Social media occurrences of the Banded Demoiselle in Great Britain

Social media offers an alternative, freely available and understudied source of biological information, useful to determine species distributions and with implications for conservation. To investigate the potential utility of this information source, UK observations of the Banded Demoiselle – a charismatic and easily identifiable species of damselfly – were collated from Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter content posted from 2010 onwards. Although this content was not necessarily intended as a biological record, when an identifiable photograph or video is shared along with associated date and location information, this provides all the data required for a species observation. This dataset provides key information on the Banded Demoiselle’s UK distribution that can complement traditional sources of biological recording and demonstrates the availability and applicability of social media as a source of ecological data.