Protected areas (PAs) are often seen as opportunity costs and are therefore vulnerable to political decisions that open them up to public or private development initiatives. We reasoned that, ceteris paribus, PAs with high levels of public support should be more resilient to such decisions because; i) politicians in democratic societies are reluctant to make unpopular/controversial decisions that go against public opinion, and; ii) the proposed development of popular PAs is more likely to be met by vigorous resistance (‘push-back’) from NGOs and other societal actors. Nevertheless, public interest and, by extension, support for protected areas has rarely been considered in PA risk assessments. Here, we propose an innovative approach to assessing the political vulnerability of PAs that combines indices of developmental pressures (from the DOPA database) with an innovative culturomic-derived metric of public interest based on Wikipedia page views. Using automated methods, we quantify the political vulnerability status of 523 Brazilian PAs. Our analysis reveals a large number of PAs that may be politically vulnerable, being characterized by a combination of high developmental pressure and low/very low levels of public interest. For such PAs, we recommend managers take measures to increase public interest to ensure a healthy base of public support in the future. We conclude that digital metrics of public interest are simply and inexpensively generated, and could be easily incorporated into the existing assessment systems for protected areas.

保护区 (PA) 通常被视为机会成本，因此容易受到政治决策的影响，这些决策将它们开放给公共或私人发展计划。我们认为，在其他条件不变的情况下，拥有高水平公众支持的 PA 应该对此类决定更具弹性，因为：i) 民主社会中的政治家不愿做出违背民意的不受欢迎/有争议的决定，并且；ii) 非政府组织和其他社会行动者的强烈抵制（“回击”）更有可能遇到受欢迎的公共保护区的拟议发展。然而，公共利益以及对保护区的支持在保护区风险评估中很少被考虑在内。这里，我们提出了一种评估 PA 政治脆弱性的创新方法，该方法将发展压力指数（来自 DOPA 数据库）与基于维基百科页面浏览量的创新文化派生公共利益指标相结合。我们使用自动化方法量化了 523 个巴西 PA 的政治脆弱性状态。我们的分析揭示了大量可能在政治上易受攻击的保护区，其特点是发展压力大，公共利益水平低/非常低。对于此类 PA，我们建议管理人员采取措施提高公众利益，以确保未来获得健康的公众支持。我们得出的结论是，公共利益的数字指标生成简单且成本低廉，并且可以轻松纳入现有的保护区评估系统。