Content analysis of nature documentaries in China: Challenges and opportunities to raise public conservation awareness

People's daily life is inevitably linked to major threats to biodiversity. It is thus important to improve people's conservation awareness. While a growing body of research has demonstrated the potential of English-language nature documentaries to raise public conservation awareness, little attention has been paid to nature documentaries that are available only in non-English languages. Here, we assessed the challenges and opportunities for nature documentaries released in China in 2021 to raise public conservation awareness by investigating their thematic, geographical, and taxonomic coverages using a content analysis approach. We found that terrestrial biomes, mammals, and birds were overrepresented in existing nature documentaries in China, while only a quarter of documentaries explicitly covered human destructive impacts on nature. Covering under-represented realms/biomes (e.g., freshwater realm and deep-marine biome), taxa (e.g., invertebrates, plants, and fungi), and anthropogenic threats in future documentaries may help to raise public awareness of biodiversity conservation. Despite these challenges, nature documentaries in China also showed a relatively good coverage of threatened species and biomes under human influence (e.g., cities and farmlands), which have increasingly been shown to be important for conservation. We also found that domestically-produced, Chinese-language nature documentaries provided unique information on biodiversity and ecosystems in China, highlighting their role in raising conservation awareness in China and worldwide. However, only 9 % of them provided English subtitles/versions. Making Chinese-language nature documentaries accessible to the global community by translating them into other languages would help us increase international awareness of biodiversity in China. The methodological approach of this study is easily applicable to nature documentaries produced in other parts of the world. By better understanding the content coverage of nature documentaries globally, we can address gaps in their thematic, geographical, and taxonomic coverages and maximize their contribution to raising conservation awareness.