Language barriers in global bird conservation

Abstract

Multiple languages being spoken within a species distribution can impede communication among conservation stakeholders, the compilation of scientific information, and the development of effective conservation actions. Here, we investigate the number of official languages spoken within the distributions of 10,863 bird species to identify which ones might be particularly affected by consequences of language barriers. We show that 1587 species have 10 languages or more spoken within their distributions. Threatened, migratory and wide-ranging species have especially many languages spoken within their distribution. Particularly high numbers of species with many languages within their distribution are found in Eastern Europe, Russia and central and western Asia. Global conservation efforts would benefit from implementing guidelines to overcome language barriers, especially in regions with high species and language diversity.

Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity

“…For example, our results showed that, globally, the proportion of studies testing conservation interventions was especially high in Japanese, Hungarian, French, and German (S1 Fig) . A synthesis activity focusing on a certain region/country should obviously cover languages that are widely spoken there, for example, Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America, and Russian in Russia. A useful tool for identifying important languages for bird conservation is an interactive map of bird species richness associated with each of the 120 official languages from each country in the world [33] (https:// translatesciences.shinyapps.io/bird_language_diversity/).…”