A case of benign neglect

Ethiopia, followed by Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe, while ‘herders’ was most often used in searches by people in Bhutan, followed by the Netherlands. In some countries, such as Australia and the United Arab Emirates, both terms were used equally. However, Google Trends cannot be used to estimate general interest in the issue of pastoralism, since the tool only synthesizes data from the Google search engine. Data from alternative search engines, in a different timespan and different language, may have given a different result in the popularity of these terms. For example, as one of the reviewers of this report noted, in order to identify information about pastoralists in the Southern Cone of South America, a search should be carried out for the term ‘criancero’. While attempts were made to translate first-tier keywords into French and Spanish, it was difficult to achieve full consensus among stakeholders on the translations and would have required more time to complete. Keyword searches were therefore conducted only in English and as a result, the study is heavily based on English-language sources. During the peer review process, reviewers were asked to read carefully through the report’s conclusions to assess whether these resonate with the world’s non-English regions. Futureglobal assessmentsonpastoralismand rangelands should consider completing this exercise in other languages to ensure a better geographical coverage of available data and information. Figure 5: Top countries that searched the terms ‘pastoralists’ and ‘herders’ on Google, 2013–2018 Notes: The maps present the top 32 countries that performed Google searchesforthetermspastoralistsandherders inthe lastfiveyears.A darker shade indicates where the terms have the highest probability of being searched. The popularity of a search term is relative to the total number of Google searches performed at a specific time in a specific location.Ahighervaluethereforemeansahigherproportion of all queries, not a higher absolute query count. Source: Google Trends.

Woman herding sheep in northeastern Turkey. Wolfgang Bayer

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