Researchers from The University of Queensland have helped design an app to protect birds at risk of extinction across the world by breaking down language barriers between scientists.
The Bird Language Diversity web app will help provide a “birds eye view”, ensuring vital information is shared to improve worldwide conservation.
UQ’s Dr Pablo Negret said the research team analysed more than 10,000 bird species, and found that 1587 species have 10 languages or more spoken within their distributions.
“Scientific information on species can be scattered across different languages, and valuable information can go missing or get lost in translation,” Dr Negret said.
To help address this, UQ researchers collaborated with scientists around the world as part of the translatE project, to develop the Bird Language Diversity app.
“This app reveals where threatened and migratory birds exist geographically, in relation to the language spoken in those regions,” Dr Negret said.
