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.

Records were collected from social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr) using the search terms “Banded Demoiselle” as well as “Calopteryx splendens”. For Twitter and Facebook, this involved a manual search (completed between 13/01/2022 and 04/04/2022), with biological records consisting of an identifiable photograph or video. These records included either a tagged location or a mention of location within the content of the post, as well as a date for the observation if provided (otherwise the date the content was shared). Records from Twitter and Facebook were geo-referenced by determining all the 1-km British National Grid squares covering the spatial extent of the location explicitly provided by the user. For each social media occurrence, spatial precision (estimated to the nearest km²) was recorded in the final dataset, identified as the numbr of 1-km grid squares that the location could be narrowed down to. For Flickr, records were collated with the Flickr application programming interface (API) using the Flickr.photos.search. These results were then manually verified to remove any misidentified observations. 

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet.