2.1. Data collection

Global news articles related to pandemics and nature were collected in April 2020 from Factiva, which is a global news database (Factiva, 2020). To search for pandemic news articles related to nature, search terms were established by investigating key environmental topics categorized by Mongabay, which is a news media platform that focuses on diverse conservation issues related to forests, wildlife, oceans, and the conservation sector (Mongabay, 2020). The established search terms were: “[Pandemic name] AND (Agriculture OR Energy OR ‘Palm Oil’ OR Animal* OR Wildlife OR Mammal* OR Conservation OR ‘Climate Change’ OR Deforestation OR Forest* OR Rainforest* OR ‘Indigenous People*’ OR Ocean*).” Here, [Pandemic name] was interchanged with SARS, Swine flu, MERS, and Ebola to provide four search results for each pandemic outbreak. Having defined the scope, these terms did not allow us to cover all possible nature-related words. However, these terms did enable us to cover keywords linked to the major global environmental issues identified by Mongabay, which is specialized in reporting these issues. Moreover, only English articles were collected to ensure that each article was examined consistently using the machine learning techniques. Consequently, the studied articles were not in different languages. Nevertheless, the English articles covered major pandemic issues globally. For each pandemic, a year with the largest number of news articles was identified. Then, all the news articles published in that year using our search terms were collected. As a result, the collected text data obtained 11,846 SARS-related articles published in 2003, 9414 Swine flu-related articles in 2009, 585 MERS-related articles in 2012, and 16,203 Ebola-related articles in 2014 (Fig. 1 ). These articles concerned various locations in the world where the pandemic outbreaks emerged, as well as the locations where news articles were reported (Fig. 2 ).

Research steps.

Locations addressed in the collected news articles. These locations indicate both places where the pandemic outbreaks occurred, and places where the news was reported.