Knowledge from non-English-language studies broadens contributions to conservation policy and helps to tackle bias in biodiversity data

Local ecological evidence is key to informing conservation. However, many global biodiversity indicators often neglect local ecological evidence published in languages other than English, potentially biassing our understanding of biodiversity trends in areas where English is not the dominant language. Brazil is a megadiverse country with a thriving national scientific publishing landscape. Here, using Brazil and a species abundance indicator as examples, we assess how well bilingual literature searches can both improve data coverage for a country where English is not the primary language and help tackle biases in biodiversity datasets.
We conducted a comprehensive screening of articles containing abundance data for vertebrates published in 59 Brazilian journals (articles in Portuguese or English) and 79 international English-only journals. These were grouped into three datasets according to journal origin and article language (Brazilian-Portuguese, Brazilian-English and International). ..., Data collection
We collected time-series of vertebrate population abundance suitable for entry into the LPD (livingplanetindex.org), which provides the repository for one of the indicators in the GBF, the Living Planet Index (LPI, Ledger et al., 2023). Despite the continuous addition of new data, LPI coverage remains incomplete for some regions (Living Planet Report 2024 – A System in Peril, 2024). We collected data from three sets of sources: a) Portuguese-language articles from Brazilian journals (hereafter “Brazilian-Portuguese” dataset), b) English-language articles from Brazilian journals (“Brazilian-English” dataset) and c) English-language articles from non-Brazilian journals (“International” dataset). For a) and b), we first compiled a list of Brazilian biodiversity-related journals using the list of non-English-language journals in ecology and conservation published by the translatE project (www.translatesciences.com) as a starting point. The International dataset was obtained ..., # Knowledge from non-English-language studies broadens contributions to conservation policy and helps to tackle bias in biodiversity data

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.ngf1vhj68](10.5061/dryad.ngf1vhj68)

## Description of the data and file structure

We collected time-series of vertebrate population abundance suitable for entry into the LPD ([livingplanetindex.org)](https://www.livingplanetindex.org/), which provides the repository for one of the indicators in the GBF, the Living Planet Index (LPI, Ledger *et al.*, 2023).

We collected data from three sets of sources: a) Portuguese-language articles from Brazilian journals (hereafter “Brazilian-Portuguese” dataset), b) English-language articles from Brazilian journals (“Brazilian-English” dataset) and c) English-language articles from non-Brazilian journals (“International” dataset). For a) and b), we first compiled a list of Brazilian biodiversity-related journals using the list of non-English-language journals in ecology and conservat...,