Johannes Langemeyer | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Same View, Different Visions -- Visual Nature Content on Social Media

Digital nature values formed through online interactions with nature might incentivize new types of environmental stewardship, but these values may also be appropriated by those who seek to undermine sustainable transformation, such as right-wing populist movements and fossil fuel industries. Specific aesthetics and visual cultures may be appropriated, borrowing their credibility or influence, and layers of platform affordances, internet cultures, and norms add additional complexities to visual communication of nature on social media. Research on this phenomenon is especially important as generative AI tools for photos and video are made readily available to social media users and far-right political ecology is rapidly evolving. In this ongoing work we ask the following research question: What is the current state of visual nature aesthetics on social media? Hereby, we follow the hypothesis that nature aesthetics are increasingly appropriated to uphold the status quo and potentially push ideologies countering transformative change. The proposed study includes three parts which strategically combine natural language processing, image clustering, and networked discourse analysis to illuminate the intersection of online aesthetic appropriation, nature values, and political ecology.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Multiscale socio-ecological networks in the age of information

Interactions between people and ecological systems, through leisure or tourism activities, form a complex socio-ecological spatial network. The analysis of the benefits people derive from their interactions with nature -- also referred to as cultural ecosystem services (CES) -- enables a better understanding of these socio-ecological systems. In the age of information, the increasing availability of large social media databases enables a better understanding of complex socio-ecological interactions at an unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution. Within this context, we model and analyze these interactions based on information extracted from geotagged photographs embedded into a multiscale socio-ecological network. We apply this approach to 16 case study sites in Europe using a social media database (Flickr) containing more than 150,000 validated and classified photographs. After evaluating the representativeness of the network, we investigate the impact of visitors' origin on the distribution of socio-ecological interactions at different scales. First at a global scale, we develop a spatial measure of attractiveness and use this to identify four groups of sites. Then, at a local scale, we explore how the distance traveled by the users to reach a site affects the way they interact with this site in space and time. The approach developed here, integrating social media data into a network-based framework, offers a new way of visualizing and modeling interactions between humans and landscapes. Results provide valuable insights for understanding relationships between social demands for CES and the places of their realization, thus allowing for the development of more efficient conservation and planning strategies.

physics.soc-ph↗