News

05 Oct 2022 New paper out in Scientific Data

Our new paper “A comprehensive database of amphibian heat tolerance” led by Patrice Pottier at the University of New South Wales has been published in Scientific Data.

In this paper, a multi-lingual team led by Patrice systematically searched the literature on amphibian heat tolerance in seven languages, and produced the most comprehensive dataset to date on amphibian upper thermal limits, spanning 3,095 estimates from 213 studies across 616 species.

Importantly, we identified 27 non-English-language studies that met the eligibility criteria (about 13% of all studies identified), which again indicates the importance of searching literature in multiple languages.

Read the open access paper (and the dataset) here.

21 Sep 2022 Coverage by Ensia

We are pleased to see our work, among others including Eliza Grames’ amazing work, is featured in a recent article by Ensia “Language barriers in conservation research could be hurting biodiversity efforts. What can be done about it?”.

Read the article here.

16 Aug 2022 Keynote for the ESA-SCBO 2022

We are very happy to announce that Tatsuya will be giving a keynote presentation at the 2022 joint conference of the Ecological Society of Australia and the Society for Conservation Biology Oceania, to be held in Wollongong, NSW from 28 November to 2 December 2022.

Keynote Speakers

Tatsuya will be talking about “Transcending language barriers, reconnecting evidence and people for conservation”.

29 Apr 2022 April 2022 update

It is our pleasure to give you the second project update of the year, especially on our two new papers and important media coverages.

Hope you enjoy it and look forward to continuing and developing collaboration with you for the rest of the year.

Many thanks for your support!

29 Apr 2022 Coverage by the Royal Society of Chemistry

Tatsuya was interviewed by the Royal Society of Chemistry’s magazine, Chemistry World, for an article on the dominance of English in science and its consequences.

The article nicely covers views from a variety of experts on this issue and is well worth a read (and a very nice header image!).

Read the article here: Publish in English or perish.

21 Apr 2022 New paper out in PLOS ONE

Our new paper “Language barriers in global bird conservation” led by Pablo Negret has been published in PLOS ONE.

By combining global datasets of distributions of 10,863 bird species and 119 official languages in 252 countries/territoris in the world, we showed that a surprisingly large number of languages are spoken within the distribution of each bird species. For example, 1,587 bird species have 10 languages or more spoken within their distributions.

Importantly, we also showed threatened and migratory species have significantly more languages spoken within their distributions. Particularly high numbers of species with many languages within their distribution are found in Eastern Europe, Russia and central and western Asia.

Read the Open Access paper here.

Also explore our Bird Language Diversity app, where you can see where in the world particularly many species are associated with each language.

04 Apr 2022 Our work featured by The Guardian

We are pleased to see our work is featured in The Guardian’s series “The age of extinction”.

Read the article here: Lost in translation: is research into species being missed because of a language barrier?

25 Mar 2022 New paper out in Conservation Biology

Our new paper “Growth of non-English-language literature on biodiversity conservation” led by Shawan Chowdhury has been published in Conservation Biology.

We show that, contrary to a common perception, the number of non-English-language articles on conservation published per year has been increasing over the past 39 years, at a rate similar to English-language articles. This indicate that non-English-language literature will continue to play an important role in conservation.

This work is based on another great collaboration with native speakers of the 15 languages. We would like to thank all the amazing collaborators for their huge contribution!

Read the Open Access article here.

29 Jan 2022 January 2022 update

It is our great pleasure to release the first project update of the year – non-English literature database in Conservation Evidence, new preprint, new members, and so on.

Hope you enjoy it and look forward to continuing/developing collaboration in the year 2022. Many thanks for your support.

29 Jan 2022 Non-English-language evidence now in the Conservation Evidence database

We are excited to see that the non-English-language studes we identified in this study are now all stored as a part of the Conservation Evidence database.

This is a huge step forward towards fully incorporating scientific evidence available in non-English languages into evidence-based conservation.

Many thanks again to all collaborators and the Conservation Evidence team!