Why use web crawlers?
The article highlights the fact that analysis and response are not necessarily organized around a single government actor, but might take place as the result of collaborations between different state and non-state stakeholders. The authors focus on three potential approaches in using web crawlers to forewarn ecological shifts. Firstly, web crawlers can collect information on the drivers of ecosystem change, rather than the resultant ecological response. For example, if rapidly emerging markets for high value species lead to overexploitation and collapse of a fishery, web crawlers can be designed to collect information on rapid changes in prices of key species, landings or investments in particular regions. Secondly, but less certain, future early warning systems can make use of the recent insight that shows that ecosystems sometimes ‘signal’ a pending collapse. The variability of fish populations has for example been shown to increase in response to over-exploitation. Thirdly, web craw
