🐦 Do some birds have #PrettyPrivilege? 💫 New paper: doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2846 We show that ~half the variation in research effort on 293 bird species in US+Canada is explained by just 3 factors: 1)visual appeal, 2)range size, & 3)# of universities w/in ranges. What we did & why it matters:🧵 - ThreadSky

silasfischer.bsky.social • 1 day ago

🐦 Do some birds have #PrettyPrivilege?
💫 New paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2846
We show that ~half the variation in research effort on 293 bird species in US+Canada is explained by just 3 factors: 1)visual appeal, 2)range size, & 3)# of universities w/in ranges. What we did & why it matters:🧵

Comments

silasfischer.bsky.social•1 day ago

We quantified research effort (# of publications📚) on 293 songbirds&near-passerines, 1965-2020. Accounting for taxonomy/name changes, we downloaded pub info for each sp. from Web of Science & manually filtered outputs (>27,000 abstracts) to include only pubs focused on each species....cont'd/

silasfischer.bsky.social•1 day ago

We created a system to score #bird species' 🤩 aesthetic appeal 😍 using documented human visual preferences for birds, then calculated each species' breeding range size (familiarity metric), the # of universities w/in each range (accessibility metric), and...cont'd/

silasfischer.bsky.social•1 day ago

We documented each species' # of journal cover appearances, and we also investigated differences in visual appeal of sp. listed as federally endangered, as well as whether their common names influenced research effort or were associated w/visual appeal, familiarity or accessibility....cont'd/

silasfischer.bsky.social•1 day ago

We used the visual appeal, familiarity, & accessibility metrics as explanatory variables to model research effort, accounting for phylogenetic relatedness. We hypothesized positive relationships, but were surprised they combined to explain 45% of publication rate variation! 😮 #Bias... cont'd/

silasfischer.bsky.social•1 day ago

In other words, drab & distant bird species have been largely neglected by ornithologists. We also found that, based on our scoring system, species listed as Endangered & those featured on journal covers scored higher in terms of visual appeal than other species. (#PrettyPrivilege?!)....cont'd/

silasfischer.bsky.social•1 day ago

After @amornith.bsky.social decided to change some species' common names, we decided to investigate whether names could also influence research. Birds w/ #eponymous names were studied less than half as often as birds not named after humans, also occurring in smaller ranges with fewer universities. 🤔

rovingosprey.bsky.social•6 hours ago

Not gonna lie, the reasons I researched American Woodcock for my masters was 1) they are ridiculous looking and 2) the idea of standing in front of people talking about woodcock and everyone has to take me seriously, amused me greatly

ornithoale.bsky.social•1 day ago

@dskarp.bsky.social check this out!

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply