Biocultural diversity

Half the population speaks only 25 of these languages, the top 5 in order being Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Bengali.

In fact, many of the areas of the world inhabited by smaller, isolated communities are also home to large numbers of endemic plant and animal species.

As these people are often considered to be "stewards" of their environments, loss of language diversity means a disappearance of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), an important factor in the conservation of biodiversity.

At the first international congress on ethnobiology in 1988, scientists met with indigenous peoples to discuss ways to better manage the use of natural resources and protect vulnerable communities around the world.

They developed the Declaration of Belem, named after the city where the congress was held, which outlined eight steps to ensure conservation efforts would be implemented effectively.

These principles were effective for establishing the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, Chile, at the southern end of the Americas, involving multiple actors, disciplines, and scales.

[18] The Hawaiian renaissance in Hawaii is held up as a global model for biocultural restoration within the scholarly literature on the topic.

The "quantum coevolution unit" (QCU) was first proposed in 2009 by Kawika B. Winter and Will McClatchey as a unit of measure for coevolution between people and plants, but has applications for quantifying other forms of coevolution.