1 Special Section: Advancing Conservation Culturomics - Introduction Ricardo A. Correia a,b,c∗† , Richard Ladle d,e† , and Uri Roll f† a Helsinki Lab of Interdisciplinary Conservation Science (HELICS), Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Helsinki 00014, Finland b Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science (HELSUS), Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Helsinki 00014, Finland c CESAM – Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, Aveiro 3910-193, Portugal d CIBIO/InBIO, Centro de Investigação Em Biodiversidade E Recursos Genéticos, Universidade Do Porto, Campus Agrário de Vairão, Vairão 4485-661, Portugal c Institute of Biological and Health Sciences, Federal University of Alagoas, Maceió 57072-900, Brazil f Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion 8499000, Israel ∗email rahc85@gmail.com †Guest Editors. All authors contributed equally to this work. Please cite this article as: Correia, R.A., Ladle, R., Roll, U., 2021. Special Section: Advancing Conservation Culturomics - Introduction. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13700 The World Wide Web became broadly available in August 1991, ushering in the Information Age and catalyzing profound changes in almost every aspect of human endeavor. This new age is characterized by online connectivity, real-time interactions, and the convergence of information and communication technology, institutions, people, and processes (Castells 2003). Statistics from 2020 show that approximately 58.8% of the global population (a little over 4.5 billion people) use the internet (https://internetworldstats.com/stats .htm). Most of these people leave digital traces of their interests and attitudes in the form of, for example, the websites they visit, the photos and comments they post on social media platforms, and the videos of their activities they record and share online. Much of these data are publicly available and, with application of some technical expertise, can yield fascinating insights into human culture, including interactions and attitudes toward nature and conservation. The quantification of human culture through the analysis of vast digital corpora has been termed “culturomics” (Michel et al. 2011) and “conservation culturomics” is the application of these methods to the study of human–nature interactions (Ladle et al. 2016). As the frequency and quality of encounters with wild nature decrease (Soga & Gaston 2016), individual knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors toward nature and nature conservation are increasingly shaped by experiences in the virtual world.