关键词: 生物多样性保护, 旗舰物种范式, LDA模型, 研究综述

Abstract

Background: The flagship species paradigm is a strategy aimed at biodiversity conservation by harnessing public influence through representative species. It encompasses three types of programs: profitable, non-profitable, and hybrid. While this approach has proven instrumental in raising public awareness and funds for conservation, it has not yet received significant academic attention in China. This lack of focus has hindered its theoretical and practical development. To address this, we propose a comprehensive review of relevant studies and offer suggestions to stimulate further research in China.

Method: This paper selected English literature relevant to the flagship species paradigm published in academic journals from 2013 to 2023 using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation thematic model with the following steps: (1) searched articles from the Web of Science with keywords such as flagship species and charismatic species; (2) adopted coherence score and perplexity scores indicators after applying unsupervised learning in Python. (3) identified the major themes and labelled core words; (4) manually read articles under each theme with current research progress summarized.

Results: This paper identified six themes, i.e., studies on the theories of the flagship species paradigm, case studies on the flagship species program, public attitudes and influencing factors identified by employing questionnaires and interviews, the realization of the paradigm in the local context, the negative impacts of adopting flagship species paradigm, and the optimization of the approach. Based on reviewing these six themes, it finds that: (1) conflicts do exist on the definition and the determination of the flagship species; (2) the adoption of flagship species programs may encounter four problems, i.e. negative impacts on animal welfare, “ceiling effect”, “Noah’s Ark” problem, and protectionism due to failure to engage local context; (3) localization, reduction of interruption, elimination of bias, and cross-border dissemination are the four research directions identified to address the identified problems.

Key words: Biodiversity conservation, Flagship species paradigm, LDA model, literature review