The concept of biocultural diversity is still relatively new and yet there are already many different variations of the term out there (like biocultural perspective, biocultural restoration, or biocultural education, to name just a few). In fact, we had found 191 different terms that are used together with biocultural (Read more on this here and here). This was based on the paper “Biocultural approaches to sustainability: A systematic review of the scientific literature” published in 2020, where my colleagues identified 178 papers published between 1990 and 2018 which deal with biocultural topics. These were then analyzed, and all the different terms where identified and coded in a separate study, using the software MAXQDA.

Now, I took a closer look at how the terms are jointly used and co-occur in the different scientific papers. That means, I then used MaxQDA to find out which terms are mentioned together in one paper. Of course, with so many different terms, this created a very messy graph, so I had to narrow it down a bit and focus on the most important findings. Therefore, I excluded all terms, which were mentioned less than five times together with at least one other term in all papers.

This means that some terms were excluded which were mentioned more often, but not more than four times in combination with others, such as biocultural history (mentioned in 6 papers), biocultural study (mentioned in 7 papers) or biocultural hotspot (mentioned in 5 papers).  In the end, I was left with 19 different terms and I visualized their co-occurrence (Fig.1).