• Index of Linguistic Diversity:
• Vitality Index of Tradional Ecological Knowledge
  

E x e c u t i v e   S u m m a r y

Biocultural Diversity in the World. Source: J.R. Stepp, E. Binford, H. Castaneda, J. Reilly-Brown, and J.C. Russell. Ethnobiology Lab, University of Florida 2007(modified from the orginal)

BIOCULTURAL DIVERSITY(BCD) is the total variety exhibited by the world’s natural and cultural systems. A basic premise of first-generation scholarship on BCD has been that the relationships between humans and the world’s non-human species, and between them both and the landscapes they inhabit, do not run on parallel tracks. Rather, these relationships affect each other, in certain cases are closely linked, and sometimes may even be constitutive of each other in important ways. Among the challenges for the next wave of BCD scholarship will be to develop quantitative measurements of BCD.

THE INDEX OF BIOCULTURAL DIVERSITY (IBCD) is a beginning step toward that goal. The IBCD measures the status of and trends in BCD on a country-by-country basis, based on five indicators: languages, religions, and ethnic groups (for cultural diversity), and bird/mammal species and plant species (for biological diversity). These indicators were selected because data are readily available for them.

The IBCD has three components:

•A biocultural diversity richness component (BCD-RICH), which is a relative measure of a country’s “raw” BCD using unadjusted counts of the five indicators.

•An areal component (BCD-AREA), which adjusts the indicators for land area and therefore measures a country’s BCD relative to its physical extent. This is important to measure because large countries are more likely to have higher biological diversity than small countries. Nevertheless, some small countries have biological diversity that is high relative to their area, just as some large countries have low biological diversity relative to their area. BCD-POP adjusts the rankings to account for these
situations.

•A population component (BCD-POP), which adjusts the indicators for human population and therefore measures a country’s biocultural diversity relative to its population size. This is important to measure because countries with high human populations are more likely to have higher cultural diversity than countries with small populations. Nevertheless, some countries with small populations have cultural diversity that is high relative to their population size; and, conversely, some countries with high populations have cultural diversity that is low relative to their population size. BCD-POP adjusts the rankings to account for these situations.

Biocultural diversity is not distributed evenly around the world. If one ranks countries according to the richness of any of the BCD indicators considered here, one gets a few very large values rapidly diminishing to many small values. This is a well-known statistical pattern, known as a logarithmic distribution, and applies equally well to the distribution of species, ethnic groups, and religions among countries. To adjust for this, we used a logarithmic scale to rank countries in the index, which results in a linear distribution of the index values.

Results are presented in an series of data tables and graphs. A key finding is that there are three “core regions” of BCD: the Amazon Basin, Central Africa, and Indomalaysia/Melanesia. (see figure 7)

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