Scientists don’t like nature emojis

A super theme is one that a group of researchers has just identified. according to an analysis presented Dec. 11 in the journal iScience, because they think that emoticons attitude towards nature does not correspond and is accurate to reality.

A team of conservation biologists has classified emojis associated with nature and animals and matched them to the phylogenetic tree of life. They found that animals are well represented in the current emoji catalog, while plants, fungi and microorganisms are poorly represented.

Researchers say creating a more diverse and representative emoji catalog could help the conversation about biodiversity and its conservation in the digital age.

“While the biodiversity crisis may seem far removed from the online world, in our increasingly digital society we should not underestimate the potential of emoji to raise awareness and build understanding of the diversity of life in the world. Earth“write environmental biologists Stefano Mammola, Mattia Falaschi and Gentile Francesco Fichetola.

“Developing and maintaining diverse and inclusive emoji sets is critical to ensuring fair representation of the tree of life in digital communication tools and effectively conveying messages about the importance of all organisms to the functioning of the biosphere.”

Animal emoji research results

The team classified all nature and animal emojis available on Emojipedia (an online emoji directory) and then compared emoji biodiversity to real-world biodiversity. They also assessed how emoji biodiversity changed between 2015 and 2022 to determine whether the emoji catalog is evolving to better represent biodiversity as new emoji are added.

92 animals, 16 plants, a fungus (probably Amanita muscaria) and a microorganism (probably Escherichia coli). “Currently available emoji cover a wide range of animal species, while plants, fungi, and microorganisms are underrepresented,” the researchers write. “Such a strong taxonomic bias is consistent with current public understanding of biodiversity, which tends to prioritize animals over other taxa.”

The researchers then took a closer look at the biodiversity characteristics of animal emojis. In some cases, they were able to identify individual animal species (for example, the bald eagle and giant panda emoji), while other emoji could only be identified at the genus or family level (for example, the ant or crocodiles emoji).

Overall, 76% of animal emojis represented vertebrates, 16% represented arthropods, and 4%, 2%, and 1% represented molluscs, cnidarians, and annelids, respectively. Given that there are 1,302,809 described arthropod species and only 85,423 described vertebrate species, this means that the current emoji catalog underrepresents arthropod biodiversity and overrepresents vertebrates.

“Exploring the use of nature-related emoji in the context of communication and biodiversity conservation may be a topic for future research,” the researchers write.