To investigate the public awareness on coastal habitats, a survey of a range of international media outlets was carried out: National Geographic, USA (www.nationalgeographic.com); the New York Times, USA (www.nytimes.com); The Economist, UK (www.economist.com); the Internacional Herald Tribune (www.iht.com); the English version of the People Daily, China (www.english.peopledaily.com.cn); the English and Spanish versions of GoogleTM news (www.news.google.com/); El País, Spain (www.elpais.es); El Universal, Mexico (www.eluniversal.com.mx); the Discovery Channel, USA (www.dsc.discovery.com/); CNN, USA (www.edition.cnn.com); Le Monde, France (www.lemonde.fr); and Journal do Brasil (jbonline.terra.com.br). The electronic archives of these media outlets were searched between February and March, 2006, for reports on seagrass meadows, salt-marshes, mangrove forests, and coral reefs contained within their electronic archives. These electronic archives did not encompass the same period for all media outlets, precluding the consistent evaluation of the time course of news reports on the different ecosystems. The adequacy of the reports was verified individually whenever the number of reports was <500 and corrected proportionately to the results of the verification of a random subset of 400 records for larger returns. A news item was considered adequate whenever it did not only include the key word but reported on some relevant element (status, functioning, management, science news, etc.) of the ecosystem of interest. The median percentage of reports received by any one ecosystem was calculated combining the calculated percentages for all 13 media sources.
We agree that the relationship between public awareness and newspaper reports may not be a simple one, as it involves feed backs: public awareness triggers interest and leads to newspaper reports, whereas more news reports lead to increasing awareness. We use news articles as a proxy for the level of awareness while avoiding discussing the causal link between these two aspects of society. To ascertain public awareness independently would require a broad questionnaire that will be possible, without huge resources, only at local scales, rendering the global scale addressed here impossible. The competition for space in top national journals is often as tough, or tougher, to provide a comparison, as that in Nature and Science. Hence, the perceived interest to the public is a prime component of the allocation of newspaper space to different items, so that more news items are assumed to correlate with greater awareness. As in our own research field, correlation cannot, however, be equated with causation.
The survey revealed public awareness to differ greatly across threatened coastal ecosystems (Fig. 2b), indicating that seagrass ecosystems receive the least attention in the media (1.3% of the media reports) with greater attention on salt marshes (6.5%), considerably more attention on mangroves (20%), and a dominant focus on coral reefs, which are the subject of three in every four media reports on coastal ecosystems (72.5%; Fig. 2b). These ratios are similar to those delivered by GoogleTM, which returned, in May 2006, 1.6 million items on seagrasses compared to 80.6 million on coral reefs. Since research effort is not evenly allocated among threatened coastal ecosystems, it is hardly surprising that public perceptions are also imbalanced. Yet, public perceptions are far more skewed toward coral reefs than scientific efforts. Indeed, there are approximately tenfold lower reports on seagrass meadows in the media for every scientific paper published (ten) than the 130–150 media reports per scientific paper for mangroves and coral reefs (Fig 2c). These ratios are relative rather than absolute values, as the media search did not encompass all media produced globally, but they are, nevertheless, indicative of the apportioning of media attention relative to scientific effort. The impact of salt marsh scientific research on their visibility in the media has an intermediate position, with approximately 45 media reports per scientific paper published (Fig 1c). This contrast clearly indicates that research efforts on seagrass ecosystems have been particularly ineffective in raising public awareness compared to research on other coastal ecosystems, particularly coral reefs and mangrove forests. The relatively high awareness of mangrove forests may derive from a general concern on tropical forests rather than an interest in mangrove forest themselves, which are often poorly appreciated even by residents of mangrove areas.
Scientific efforts and public awareness are not independent, since public awareness of acute environmental problems, such as threats to the conservation of endangered coastal ecosystems, strongly affects patterns of resource allocation by public funding agencies. Research efforts and public awareness interact on a feed-back loop that helps address problems in charismatic ecosystems or species but may leave other similarly important issues behind in less appealing ecosystems. The results presented conclusively show seagrass meadows to be, in contrast to charismatic coral reefs, the ‘ugly duckling’ of coastal ecosystem conservation. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defined charisma as “a special magnetic charm or appeal” (www.merriam-webster.com). The results presented show coral reefs to be appealing to the media and the public that consume it and portray other ecosystems, such as seagrass meadows, as comparably uninteresting. We interpret this contrast to suggest that seagrass meadows are not, at present, charismatic to the public. The apparent lack of charisma of seagrass meadows is to some extent the result of their submersed growth, which hides them to the casual observer, and their resemblance to grasslands on land, which hardly raise public interest. In contrast, the dense array of dazzling and colorful fish and invertebrates that populate coral reefs fascinate the public, as indicated by the important tourism revenues supported by coral reefs. Coral reefs are popular subjects for nature documentaries and have been further popularized by top-hit films (e.g., Finding Nemo by Pixar Animation Studio, 2003).