More often than not, the general public is unaware that fish are native to and reside in desert aquatic ecosystems due to many factors, including disassociation of fish and desert environments and limited availability of accessible information such as high quality film. Due to this, the U.S. Forest Service district in Safford, Arizona requested a short video, six to eight minutes in duration, featuring the natural history of critically threatened Oncorhynchus gila and Oncorhynchus apache inhabiting the Pinalenõs Mountains. They intended to use the video to educate the public at informational kiosks in a new visitor center being developed in the Sky Islands of Arizona. Objectives of the project were to ensure the use of videography as an educational tool was cost effective, provided the intended message, and reached the target audience. Following production, my research focused on online distribution and characterized viewership through publicly available, anonymous analytics.
Results/Conclusions:
We predicted that 1) sharing the video through social media platforms associated with fish or natural resources would generate a predominantly male audience that would watch the video for a longer duration, and that 2) sharing the video through social media platforms that are unaffiliated with natural resources would generate viewers that were not dominated by either males or females and average viewing duration would be shorter. Preliminary results have shown that my initial predictions are correct in that viewership is predominantly male through fish or natural resource affiliated social media platforms, accounting for over 70% of all views with an average duration of 3 minutes and 38 seconds out of 7 minutes and 7 seconds total.