Press coverage and public perception of crested porcupines in urban and rural areas of Italy

Amongst species well-adapted to urban environments, crested porcupines are increasingly encountering humans in cities, creating a need to understand public attitudes towards this species. If – on one side – porcupines are attractive and charismatic because of their unmistakable aspect, on the other side their closeness may trigger conflicts with humans, as being regarded as a crop pest. In this work we applied a sentiment analysis to test the general perception towards this large-sized rodent in urban areas. In this work, we analyzed 73 articles from 16 major Italian newspapers. We employed a mixed approach for sentiment analysis: human classification (positive, negative or neutral) and automatic emotion recognition using a lexicon. Sentiment analysis revealed a varied public perception: 43 % negative, 41 % positive, and 16 % neutral. News coverage primarily focused on encounters in human-dominated environments, with urban areas being the most frequent setting. Media attention on crested porcupines surged in recent years, especially focusing on their increasing presence in humandominated environments. Social perception reflected the dualism between the surprise of detecting this species in urban areas, and the potential conflicts which may arise, without a net prevalence of either positive or negative attitudes toward the species. Our work represents a reproducible approach to tackle the complexity of human-wildlife coexistence in urban areas, besides shedding light on the importance of including media coverage and public perception within the human dimension of wildlife conservation, particularly in urban areas.