Interdisciplinary Programm on indigenous indicators of Fauna and Flora – PIAF

(ethnologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists and lawyers), focusing on the interactions between societies and the environment. The program was based on a link between long-term study sites (CNRS Workshops and LTER programs) and on the achievements of multidisciplinary research collectives established on these sites and shedding light on the dynamics of socio-economic systems. Our teams have accumulated data to compare the local perception of global changes by different categories of actors in regions located on three continents. Field research was conducted in the 12 sites involved in the project and with a common methodology to collect potentially comparable data. The common methodological tools were: standard sampling, semi-structured interviews with associated interview grids, conducting freelists and related interviews and a participatory photography method.

Piaf has shown that understanding perceptions of environmental change at the local level can not be done without considering the sociological changes affecting the territories concerned. experience in the landscape and transmission of knowledge between generations is more important in determining perception of change than is knowledge acquired through formal education or the media. piaf has helped to build an international and interdisciplinary network of young researchers on the issue of human-nature interactions and biodiversity conservation issues in the context of change.

Piaf is now renewed through the implementation of new projects and the acquisition of research programs on soundscapes as indicators of socio-ecological changes with new partners including institutions affiliated to LabEx DynamiTe and Driihm (UMI IGlobes and OHIM Pima County, Arizona, USA) (Sonates 2018-2020 and Sonatas 2018). We continue our anaysis on climate change adaptation issues through a project funded by the Thomas Jefferson Fund (2018-2020) in which we conduct a comparative analysis of innovations in food systems in the Appalachians and the South West of France.

The Piaf program has given rise to numerous papers in national and international conferences (SFE 2017, SFAA 2017, 2018, AAG 2018, SHE 2018, ICCIS 2018 etc.) and the publication (in progress) of scientific articles in (cut:journals) peer-reviewed journals (nss), special issues (nss and ethnographiques.org) and an edited book in the springer nature ethnobiology series. Piaf has been the subject of two photographic exhibitions and public conferences. A more applied research component, in progress, aims at mobilizing knowledge usable by local managers and users and generic knowledge from the comparison (general principles of understanding the relationship that humans have with nature) that can be used at scale by conservation actors in the international community.

PIAF is a multidisciplinary, comparative research project situated on three continents and in four countries (France, United States, Cameroon, and Zimbabwe). It seeks to understand: (1) in the context of rapid change in rural areas (e.g. demographic shifts, climate change, policy pressures) how local stakeholders (both the lay public and land mangers) seek to understand changes in their environments by observing the state of the biodiversity around them; and (2) how these observations and diagnostics allow them to manage or protect their landscapes and biodiversity on a daily basis and build strategies to adapt to perceived changes.
PIAF entails the formation of a multidisciplinary team of young researchers (ethnologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists and lawyers) each from UMRs that are well known in their respective fields and whose research programs focus on socio-environmental interactions. Our project is based on bringing together multiple sites of long-term research (the Zones Ateliers of CNRS and the Long Term Ecological Research program) and leveraging the existing multidisciplinary research conducted in these field sites, providing insight into the dynamics of socio-ecological systems in the context of global change. Our teams have accumulated body of data and analyses that will permit us to undertake a comparison of local perceptions of global change by different types of actors, across three continents. At the same time, it will allow us to understand changes in biological processes in these same areas.
We argue, therefore, that through the comparison of these local case studies we will construct a general understanding of how people use biodiversity to understand environmental change – in the city or country, in the North and in the South. The broad applicability of the framework across these different gradients and areas is the fundamentally transformative aspect of this project.
PIAF seeks to understand how these societies think about the effects of change in their environments: (1) what are the diagnostics that local actors use, whether they are members of the lay public or managers, (e.g. identification and interpretation of changes, adaptation strategies); (2) what is the articulation between different types of indigenous and external forms of knowledge, both local and global (managers, technicians, scientists), and how do these different knowledge bases complement or contradict each other in local environmental management plans; 3) how do the socioeconomic, political, and environmental contexts influence the development of diagnostics and the privileging of certain types of knowledge to the detriment of others (power relationships between actors, proximity to a protected area, etc.)?
PIAF is a program of basic research that will contribute a general conceptual framework and methods for comparative analyses of the objects of our research and seeks to build an international and interdisciplinary network of young researchers around the question of human-nature interactions and issues of biodiversity conservation. A second research component that is more applied seeks to mobilize knowledge useful for managers and local land users, as well as the generalizable knowledge derived from comparison that is useful at the global scale (general principles of understanding relations that humans have with nature) for conservation practitioners in the international community.