Abstract:

Background: The flagship species paradigm is a strategic approach to biodiversity conservation that leverages public influence through representative species. Despite its effectiveness in raising public awareness and funds for conservation, this approach has not yet received significant academic attention in China, stalling its theoretical and practical development. To address this gap, we propose a comprehensive review of relevant studies and offer suggestions to stimulate further research in China.

Method: This paper conducted a review of English literature relevant to the flagship species paradigm published in academic journals from 2013 to 2023 using the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) thematic model.The method involved the following steps: (1) retrieving articles from the Web of Science with keywords such as flagship species and charismatic species; (2) employing coherence score and perplexity score indicators following unsupervised learning in Python. (3) identifying the major themes and labeling core words; (4) manually examining articles under each theme, summarizing current research progress.

Results: This paper identified six themes, including studies on the theories of the flagship species paradigms, case studies on the flagship species program, public attitudes and influencing factors elucidate through questionnaires and interviews, implementation of the paradigm within local context, the negative impacts of adopting flagship species paradigm, and the optimization of the approach. Based on reviewing these six themes, several findings were noticed: (1) conflicts do exist on the definition and determination of the flagship species; (2) adopting flagship species programs may encounter four problems, i.e. negative impacts on animal welfare, the ceiling effect, the “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.

Suggestion: This article provides suggestions based on further discussion of three key issues, i.e., the definition of the flagship species, the selection criteria for flagship species, and the restriction of the flagship species paradigm. More research should be conducted on the realization of the paradigm, coordination and participation of various stakeholders, optimization of selection criteria of flagship species and planning, and improvement of localization and international cooperation.

Key words: biodiversity conservation, flagship species paradigm, LDA model, research progress