Beyond Social Media: Curated Monitoring Footage as a Biodiversity Information Source for Conservation

Timely and reliable information on species occurrence and distribution is essential for biodiversity conservation, but conventional surveys are often limited by incomplete spatial coverage, high costs, and infrequent updates. These limitations are particularly relevant for medium- and large-sized mammals, whose distributions may respond rapidly to human disturbance and land-use change. Here, we evaluated the potential of long-term, curated mass-media records to support biodiversity knowledge by analyzing The Eyes of the Secret Land (TESL), a Chinese television program based mainly on infrared camera-trap footage collected across protected areas in China. We extracted mammal records from 1829 episodes broadcast between 2019 and 2024 and compared media-exposed species richness patterns with official provincial biodiversity data using Spearman rank correlation. TESL documented 118 mammal species, including 42 nationally protected and 52 IUCN-threatened species. Media-exposed species richness was positively correlated with official richness at the provincial level (ρ = 0.68, p < 0.001). Generalized linear models identified episode count and latitude as significant predictors of media-exposed species richness. Comparison with IUCN range maps also identified three potential new distribution records. These results demonstrate that curated monitoring footage from a mass-media program can recover broad-scale biodiversity patterns, although inherent taxonomic and spatial biases necessitate cautious interpretation. We propose that curated monitoring footage represents a promising but underutilized supplementary data source for biodiversity assessment and conservation science communication.