Social media data reveal novel habitats for invasive species

Invasive alien species pose significant threats to biodiversity, yet their distributions remain poorly documented across much of the tropics. Using Bangladesh, a megapopulated tropical country, we combine species distribution data from Facebook and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to evaluate how data integration improves invasive alien species distribution. Our compiled dataset contains 11,469 occurrence records for 65 species. Although Facebook contributed only 6% of the total records, it provided more data than GBIF for two-thirds of the species and served as the unique source of distribution data for 23 species. Incorporating Facebook data increased estimated range sizes for 44 species and expanded the spatial extent of species distributions by 14%. Facebook records also exhibited distinct environmental patterns, often in urban and human-impacted areas. Our study demonstrates that social media can help fill critical biodiversity data gaps in under-sampled regions, and should be integrated into invasive species monitoring and conservation planning frameworks. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2SS7B Subjects Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

citizen science, data integration, Facebook, GBIF, iEcology, invasive species, online data, tropics Dates Published: 2025-07-03 07:06 License No Creative Commons license Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: NA Data and Code Availability Statement: The GBIF data is publicly available (GBIF, 2025). We uploaded the Facebook data in the supplementary section. All the codes used in the analysis are publicly available in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/ShawanChowdhury/InvasiveSpecies_SocialMedia_Bd). Language: English