WASP: the World Archives of Species Perception

Abstract

While human perception can play a role in influencing public support for species conservation, the mechanisms underlying human perceptio remain poorly understood. Some previous studies on perception have focused on a few specific taxa, which makes the understanding of th public perception of species at large a resource-and time-intensive task. Here, we introduce the World Archives of Species Perception projec that consists of an animal survey and a plant survey to construct the first systematic database to study the human perception of the floral an faunal diversity at a global scale. We provide a description of our survey method, species selection, survey implementation and a discussio of the potential uses of our databases in multidisciplinary research. In the animal survey, we cover 1980 International Union for Conservatio of Nature (IUCN)-evaluated species, representing 25 classes, 192 orders, 1037 families and 1705 genera. In the plant survey, we cover 200 IUCN-evaluated species, representing 13 classes, 93 orders, 386 families and 1968 genera. Data from the survey will be collected and mad available 24 months after the publication of the article.