Social media reports of urban carnivores in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles county

In this study, we analyzed 2,584 posts and comments on carnivore sightings, human-carnivore interactions, and attitudes toward carnivores via the neighborhood-based social media platform Nextdoor, focusing on 52 peri-urban neighborhoods near the Angeles National Forest in California. We focused on the two most frequently discussed species: coyote (Canis latrans) and American black bear (Ursus americanus). We then analyzed social-ecological covariates as potential predictors of Nextdoor carnivore reports, and also compared the sightings of these species to data collected on the popular biodiversity logging application, iNaturalist.

Methods
With the help of community members recruited through the personal network of W.S., we created three Nextdoor accounts using addresses in the cities of Arcadia, El Monte, and Covina. We gathered posts and comments for analysis through systematic searches conducted via Nextdoor’s search function while logged into each of the three accounts. We searched Nextdoor using the following keywords: “wildlife”, “bear”, “mountain lion”, “puma”, “coyote”, “bobcat”, “deer”, “raccoon”, and “opossum” between December of 2021 and January of 2022. While results relating to species other than black bear and coyote were later excluded due to limited sample sizes, the Nextdoor search algorithm returned posts related to multiple species under each keyword; thus, our two focal species were sometimes mentioned in comments related to other species within our search. The posts and comments gathered were produced by users between July of 2019 and January of 2022. We reviewed every post returned in the search and included posts which specifically mention wildlife or human-wildlife interactions in an initial data set. We then reviewed each post and all of the comments on each post, and included posts and comments in our subsequent analysis if they contained mention of wildlife sightings, attitudes towards wildlife, or wildlife conflict mitigation strategies. We excluded joke comments and comments expressing attitudes towards a conflict event but not towards the wildlife themselves (e.g., “I’m so sorry you lost your cat”), as well as general statements about the behavior or natural history of urban wildlife, and posts about species other than coyote and black bear. We entered each post or comment into a spreadsheet for further analysis, along with the date of posting and the Nextdoor neighborhood of the user.