Limited accessibility and bias in wildlife-wind energy knowledge: A bilingual systematic review of a globally distributed bird group

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

“…Earlier studies have also attempted to quantify the importance of non-English-language scientific knowledge in ecological evidence syntheses. For example, 67% of the scientific literature identified in a systematic review on Japanese bats including many endemic and threatened species was in Japanese [61], literature searches in Spanish increased the amount of scientific literature on interactions between birds and wind farms by 11% [62], and 65% of the literature included in a systematic review on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a continental-scale infrastructure development that potentially has disastrous consequences for biodiversity in the region, was in Chinese [63]. Despite the importance of their findings, most studies are limited only to a specific research topic and a single non-English language, restricting the generalizability of their findings.…”

Better utilisation and transparency of bird data collected by powerline companies

“…To address this deficiency, improved standardisation and guidance of methods is suggested, as has been highlighted in the wind farm industry (e.g. Bernardino et al, 2013;Fernández-Bellon, 2020). This would also help TSOs that are not yet sharing data with the design of studies and database formats to ensure that they are transferable.…”

“…Furthermore, issues of variable data quality, lack of standardisation of methods and reporting, lack of availability of grey literature and lack of general sharing of information have been identified as limitations in the context of wind energy mitigation (Fernández-Bellon, 2020) and are likely to show ` parallels with the powerline sector. In order for such an international effort of data sharing to succeed, companies that have access to bird data associated with powerlines must first be willing to collect and share such data.…”

Culturally diverse expert teams have yet to bring comprehensive linguistic diversity to intergovernmental ecosystem assessments

“…20,21 For instance, meta-analyses that omit a large proportion of literature because it is not in English could bias ecological evidence syntheses due to systematic differences in study characteristics (e.g., study species, ecosystem types) and statistical results (e.g., effect size). 22 As one example, several studies have shown that there is extensive scientific literature on wildlife-wind farm interactions in languages, such as Spanish 23 and German, 24 that are not broadly cited in English-language literature. Including such non-English literature would greatly amplify the sample size that conclusions are based on and may either confirm or repute conclusions based on English-language only studies.…”