A critical component of textbooks is fair representation of the material they cover. Within conservation biology, fair coverage is particularly important given Earth’s breadth of species and diversity of ecosystems. However, research on species tends to be biased towards certain taxonomic groups, so it is possible that textbooks may exhibit a similar bias. Our goal was to evaluate contemporary books in the field of conservation biology to determine if they are representative of Earth’s biodiversity. To address our goal, we categorized all figures, tables, and boxes in eight recently published conservation biology textbooks. Specifically, we quantified taxonomic group (if described), whether human influence (positive or negative) was noted in the example, if the species or group was a marine or terrestrial organism, geographic location of where the data were gathered, genetic diversity, species, and ecosystem type. Taxa evaluated included bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian, fish, plant, invertebrate (not including insects), insect, other (fungi, bacteria, protozoa, etc).
Results/Conclusions
Based on our sampling, we found that when a specific taxon was described, 30% were mammals, 19% were birds, 14% were plants, 8% were fish, 7% were reptiles, 7% were invertebrates (excluding insects), 6.7% were insects, 6% were amphibians, and 3% fell under other categories. These results are vastly different from Earth’s actual species diversity. Of the boxes, figures, and tables that noted human influence, 65% were examples of negative human influence, while only 35% depicted positive human influence on the environment. Roughly 76% of examples mentioning a specific taxon used data from terrestrial organisms. There were also disparities in which continents were used in examples, with North America accounting for 33%, Asia 20%, Australia 18%, South America 17%, Africa 14%, Europe 8%, and Oceania 0.5%. Antarctica was not mentioned. Our findings suggest that modern conservation biology textbooks are biased in terms of coverage of taxonomic groups, human influence on the environment, and equal representation of ecosystems across the planet. Skewed representation of biodiversity in textbooks could favor an inaccurate view of the world due to insufficient knowledge of its multitudinous ecosystems and biota.