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

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.80gb5mm04](10.5061/dryad.80gb5mm04)

## Description of the data and file structure

We estimated demographic and ecological characteristics of Nextdoor neighborhoods using ArcGis Pro Version 2.8.6 (ESRI 2022). We calculated demographic estimates for each neighborhood by weighing the values in constituent census blocks and block groups by the percent to which they constituted each neighborhood polygon. We used curated data on total population, population by race, median household income, and median home value for each neighborhood (US Census Bureau 2020). We used a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) dataset derived from imagery (60cm spatial resolution) collected by the National Agriculture Imagery Program in May 2020 (California Department of Fish and Wildlife, 2020) to calculate mean NDVI for each neighborhood. We used data regarding votes for major candid...,