Camara-Leret, R. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2024

Amazonian biocultural heritage under climate change

Amazonia harbors one fourth of the worlds plant diversity and over 300 Indigenous groups. So far, however, no study has assessed how climate change may simultaneously impact its biological and cultural heritage. To bridge this gap, we assembled a database on 5,833 utilized plant species and show that climate change will reduce more the ranges of utilized than of non-utilized species by 2070. Locally, Indigenous cultures may lose an average of 65% of their utilized plant species and 50% of their associated services from climate change. Regionally, the loss of threatened languages may result in a 41% reduction in the Amazonian knowledge pool. Overall, our results point to the strong climate vulnerability of Amazonian biocultural heritage.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

There are nearly 7,400 languages in the world and over 30% of these will no longer be spoken by the end of the century1. So far, however, our understanding of whether language extinction may result in the loss of linguistically-unique knowledge remains limited. Here, we ask to what degree indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants is associated to individual languages and quantify how much indigenous knowledge may vanish as languages and plants go extinct. Focussing on three independent re-gions that have a high biocultural diversity --North America, northwest Amazonia, and New Guinea--we show that >75% of all 12,495 medicinal plant services are linguistically-unique, i.e., only known to one language. Whereas most plant species associated with linguistically-unique knowledge are not threatened, most languages that report linguistically-unique knowledge are. Our finding of high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages suggests that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.

ecology↗