Two years ago, a group of ornithologists was outraged by the publication of a paper that highlighted how much scientists still don’t know about birds from Latin America and the Caribbean. Many criticized the authors—based at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom—for citing few studies by scientists from the region and from journals that don’t publish in English. Others said the paper, published in Ornithological Advances, perpetuated an elitist, exclusionary, “northern” approach that has overlooked the knowledge produced by Latin American experts and Indigenous people.
“It made me angry,” recalls bird ecologist Ernesto Ruelas Inzunza of the University of Veracruz in Xalapa, Mexico. “Deliberately or not,” he says, the article ignored “that today’s neotropical ornithology is nurtured by Latin American and Caribbean scientists.” He and others vowed to change that by smashing an array of barriers that they say have long disadvantaged ornithologists from neotropical nations and deprived the field of their contributions. Yesterday, their resolve bore fruit in two papers published in Ornithological Applications.
In one, 124 authors from the region examine numerous factors—including a shortage of funding, few Latin American ornithologists in leadership roles, and a bias against citing papers in Spanish and Portuguese—that they say have often marginalized the region’s researchers. In the other, a smaller group offers 14 recommendations for how the field’s major journals can revise their policies and practices to improve the flow of science from the region’s bird scientists.
Both papers identify “language hegemony,” the use of English by major journals, as a problem. Few people in neotropical nations are native English speakers, the authors note, so journals often ask researchers from the region to have their manuscripts edited by a professional service. But that can cost up to $600—more than many Latin American scientists make in a month. To lower the language barrier, the authors recommend journals accept manuscripts in Spanish and Portuguese for review, then translate them into English if accepted for publication–and also consider publishing a version in a second language.
Language hegemony also hinders clear communication about bird names and imposes a “northern lens” on the field, the authors say. Journals and meetings often require the use of English names, they note, “rather than the scientific (Latin) names that are supposed to be a global standard.” Such rules not only require Latin American researchers to learn the English names, which were often imposed by Europeans studying museum specimens, but also discourage the use of names developed by Indigenous people, which can carry valuable information about how a bird sings or where it lives. In Chile’s La Araucanía region, for example, the Mapuche people identify the austral pygmy owl (Glaucidium nana) by names—including chon-chon and kijkij that mimic the bird’s calls. Such local knowledge, the authors say, is rarely included in studies.
“We continue to legitimize the idea that what’s important is European knowledge,” says Kristina Cockle, a Canadian ornithologist at the Institute of Subtropical Biology in Argentina, where she has lived for nearly 20 years. She and her co-authors urge funders, institutions, and journals to find ways to encourage collaboration with local communities, including by allowing nonacademics or local researchers to help develop research questions, co-lead projects, and author papers.
Funders and others also need to do more to encourage the study and publication of the basic biology of neotropical bird species, the authors say. Descriptive information, such as a bird’s diet or behavior, is often foundational to broader insights into bird ecology and evolution, they note, and much of it comes from fieldwork in the neotropics. But such studies can be hard to publish in prominent journals, which favor studies of ecology, biogeography, or conservation.
It’s also been difficult for Latin American researchers to find the funding and equipment necessary to carry out such fieldwork, says Cecilia Cuatianquiz Lima, an ornithologist at the Autonomous University of Tlaxcala in Mexico. Her doctoral research, for example, required her to climb trees to study birds that nest in holes. But her lab’s funds were almost nonexistent, and her scholarship did not cover the costs for the climbing equipment she needed. “It was very complicated for me to get better data,” Cuatianquiz Lima says.
The papers offer examples of how the absence of such data from the global south has allowed flawed ideas to linger. In the 1990s, for instance, researchers from North America published an influential study indicating neotropical birds thought to be monogamous cheated on their partners less often than monogamous species in temperate regions. But Valentina Ferretti, an evolutionary ecologist at the Institute of Ecology, Genetics, and Evolution in Argentina, noted the study’s sample included relatively few neotropical species. In 2019, after adding data that she and other researchers had gathered on additional species, she found there was no clear geographic pattern. “It’s a mistake to come up with theories that are based on only a minority of bird diversity,” Ferretti says.
The two papers “will undoubtedly sensitize” ornithologists from the global north about the challenges facing their colleagues in the south, says ornithologist Joseph Wunderle of the U.S. Forest Service, who is based in Puerto Rico. And they are already bringing attention to practices that many researchers assumed to be norms, such as the exclusion of women, trans people, as well as Black and Indigenous voices, who have been historically marginalized from neotropical ornithology. The discussion is “teaching us how to interpret a lot of things that we just took for granted,” says Alexandre Aleixo, a Brazilian ornithologist at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki.
The lead author of the study that ignited the discussion 2 years ago, ornithologist Alexander Lees of Manchester Metropolitan University, says he hopes the recommendations catalyze change. Initially, he felt stung by the criticism, particularly because he has collaborated extensively with local researchers in the Brazilian Amazon for decades. Now, he thinks his paper could produce “a bit of a funny legacy. … [I]f it means that the field grows and becomes more inclusive, then, you know, I’ll take that.”
Source: Science Mag