Fig 4. Higher online web search interest in endangered and critically endangered species of vertebrate is associated with greater financial investment in their conservation.

a) The relationship between the average monthly web search interest in species between 2004 and 2014, and the amount of international aid invested in their protection (in US dollars) was quantified using a Gaussian GLM performed on log transformed (to reduce leverage) response and predictor variables. Species for which no financial investment was recorded (0 on the y axis) were not included in this analysis but were included in b. b) The relationship between the average monthly web search interest in species between 2004 and 2014, and the probability that they received international aid over the same time period, was quantified using a Binomial GLM performed on a log transformed (to reduce leverage) predictor variable. Values of 1 on the y axis indicate species that received aid, while values of 0 indicate those for which no aid was documented. The grey regions in both panels represent the 95% confidence intervals of the predicted relationships (broken lines). Data are presented for 173 species of critically endangered and endangered vertebrate that Google Trends returned web search interest data for. Aid data were downloaded from the Aiddata database (see Methods for details) and are given in S9 Table.