School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United States of America.
Christoffel Conservation, Madison, WI, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Jul 10;15(7):e0234877. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234877. eCollection 2020.
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 and geographic areas and their associated ecosystems, so it is possible that textbooks may exhibit similar biases. Considering the possibility of bias, our goal was to evaluate contemporary conservation biology textbooks to determine if they are representative of Earth's biodiversity. We found that textbooks did not accurately reflect Earth's biodiversity. Species, ecosystems, and continents were unevenly represented, few examples mentioned genetic diversity, and examples of negative human influence on the environment outweighed positive examples. However, in terms of aquatic versus terrestrial representation, textbooks presented a representative sample. Our findings suggest that modern conservation biology textbooks are biased in their coverage, which could have important consequences for educating our next generation of scientists and practitioners.
教科书的一个关键组成部分是对其涵盖的材料的公正表述。在保护生物学中，鉴于地球物种的广泛和生态系统的多样性，公正的涵盖范围尤为重要。然而，物种方面的研究往往偏向于某些分类群和地理区域及其相关的生态系统，因此教科书也有可能表现出类似的偏见。考虑到存在偏见的可能性，我们的目标是评估当代保护生物学教科书，以确定它们是否代表地球的生物多样性。我们发现，教科书并没有准确反映地球的生物多样性。物种、生态系统和大陆的代表性不均衡，很少有例子提到遗传多样性，而且环境对人类的负面影响例子超过了积极的例子。然而，就水生与陆生的代表性而言，教科书呈现了一个有代表性的样本。我们的研究结果表明，现代保护生物学教科书在其涵盖范围上存在偏见，这可能对教育我们下一代科学家和实践者产生重要影响。
