The role of non-English-language science in informing national biodiversity assessments

Abstract

Consulting the best available evidence is key to successful conservation decision-making. While much scientific evidence on conservation continues to be published in non-English languages, a poor understanding of how non-English language science contributes to conservation decision-making is causing global assessments and studies to practically ignore non-English-language literature. By investigating the use of scientific literature in biodiversity assessment reports across 37 countries/territories, we uncover the established role of non-English-language literature as a major information source locally. On average, non-English-language literature constituted 65% of the references cited, and were recognised as relevant knowledge sources by 75% of report authors. This means that by ignoring non-English-language science, international assessments may overlook important information on local/regional biodiversity. A quarter of the authors acknowledged the struggles of understanding English-language literature. This points to the need to aid the use of English-language literature in domestic decision-making, for example, by providing non-Englishlanguage abstracts or improving/implementing machine translation.

Perspective: sustainability challenges, opportunities and solutions for long-term ecosystem observations

“…Although we primarily focused on specific examples from Japan to illustrate the sustainability challenges, opportunities and solutions for ecosystem monitoring, we believe that the content is common and helpful across countries and regions. Most of the initiatives and efforts taking place in many parts of the world, especially in non-English speaking countries, are not well recognized worldwide (also see [44,145]). Monitoring data, even when publicly available, are often in the local language rather than English, limiting their use beyond the country or language area.…”

“…The reported evidence serves as the foundation for strengthening the detection and attribution sequence, including the development of causal models and the reinforcement of the observational framework based on them [16]. However, we speculate that the underuse of vast amounts of information and evidence, owing to cultural and linguistic barriers [41–44,145,146], has led to significant unrecognized losses and opportunity costs in advancing the framework to address biodiversity issues. We hope that these insights on how to sustain ecosystem monitoring in a manner that is feasible and equitable can be expanded to solve global challenges in socio-ecological systems.…”

The impact of rising temperatures on the prevalence of coral diseases and its predictability: A global meta‐analysis

“…While our literature sample size is large, assessing more regions (given coral reefs are in developing nations) and including as many languages as possible in future reviews would aid in accurately describing the state of knowledge and incorporate a more global representation of data. Other languages make up 35% of literature in similar fields (Amano et al, 2016) and recent reports suggest non-English literature does augment environmental data in a non-negligible way (Amano et al, 2023;Pottier et al, 2022). Moreover, we also excluded grey literature, such as government reports.…”

Keywords to success: a practical guide to maximise the visibility and impact of academic papers

“…Translating titles and abstracts enhances inclusivity, broadens the scope and impact of research, and serves as a bridge to overcome language barriers [22][23][24][25]. The reach of scientific studies can be expanded to include scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and the general public in non-English speaking regions by making content available in different languages when permitted [21][22][23][24][25][26]. This fosters a more balanced global understanding of scientific advancements.…”

“…However, only 17% of journals in biological sciences allow multilingual abstracts [22]. We encourage editors to consider publishing multilingual summaries to increase the accessibility of scientific knowledge in countries where English is not the primary language, potentially yielding a greater impact [22][23][24][25][26]. For instance, FEMS (Federation of European Microbiological Societies) journals have translated the abstracts and titles of numerous articles in Portuguese and Spanish, which has significantly increased knowledge discovery (https://academic.oup.com/fems-journals/pages/alam_2018; accessed on 2023/08/23).…”