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Animal Migrations² Track with Wikipedia Searches

Every spring, migratory³ birds flood back to where they breed. That migratory behavior is accompanied by some human behavior: "In English-language Wikipedia, the page views for migratory species like the indigo⁴ bunting or the Baltimore oriole tend to peak in the spring when those birds arrive in the United States on their breeding grounds."

每年春天，候鸟都会飞回繁殖的地方。这种迁徙行为伴随着人类的一些行为:“在维基百科中，靛蓝旗莺或巴尔的摩金莺等迁徙物种的页面浏览量往往在春天达到峰值，因为那时这些鸟类抵达美国的繁殖地。”

John Mittermeier, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford⁵ in England.

约翰·米特梅尔是英国牛津大学的一名自然保护生物学家。

"It's this incredible thing where you can see in people's online behavior and how they're using Wikipedia, the fingerprints⁶ of the arrival of the birds."

这是一件不可思议的事情，你可以从人们的网络在线行为和他们如何使用维基百科上看到，鸟类到来的痕迹。”

And not just birds. Mittermeier and his team surveyed nearly two-and-a-half billion Wikipedia page views, for 32 thousand species, across 245 languages, and also saw variable search rates for insects, ferns, horsetails and flowering plants. And the online searches for birds, at least, seemed to correlate with real-world data on migration¹ times.

不仅仅是鸟类。米特梅尔和他的团队调查了维基百科上近25亿的页面浏览量，涵盖了245种语言、3.2万种物种，还发现了昆虫、蕨类植物、马尾草和开花植物的搜索率各不相同。至少，对鸟类的在线搜索似乎与真实的迁徙时间相关。

The researchers also found that Lithuanian Wikipedia pages, for example, had more seasonality⁸ than pages in Thai or Tamil—probably because seasonal⁷ differences increase with latitude⁹. The finding is in the journal PLOS Biology.

例如，研究人员还发现立陶宛语维基百科的页面比泰语或泰米尔语的页面更具有季节性，这可能是因为季节差异随纬度的增加而增加。这一发现发表在《公共科学图书馆生物学》杂志上。

Mittermeier says search data could be useful to conservation biologists. "In areas that are hard for biologists to survey or reach, maybe we could be using online data like Wikipedia data to detect migration patterns or flowering seasons or things like that."

米特梅尔说搜索数据可能对保护生物学家有用。“在生物学家难以调查或到达的地区，或许我们可以利用维基百科等在线数据来探测迁徙模式或开花季节等。”

He was also encouraged by the search results: "I think there's a concern among conservationists that people are losing touch with the natural world and that they're not interacting with native species anymore. And so in that context to see that actually people's Wikipedia behavior is strongly corresponding to these phenological patterns in nature was really exciting and quite unexpected for me."

他也被搜索结果所鼓舞:“我认为自然保护主义者担心人们正在与自然世界失去联系，他们不再与本土物种互动。因此，在这样的背景下，看到人们在维基百科上的行为与自然界的物候模式有很强的对应关系，我真的很兴奋，也很出乎我的意料。”