ID: 613 / 158

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: PRESERVATION AND PROMOTION OF TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE ERA OF OPEN SCIENCE: BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

Abstract: Researchers and policy makers increasingly recognize that Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) systems are essential for getting effective and socially legitimate biodiversity conservation measures. Given its relevance, there are numerous initiatives aiming at TEK documentation and preservation (e.g., national public TEK registers in Panama and Peru; institutional databases for TEK in China, India and Venezuela; national inventory of TEK in Spain.). These initiatives pretend to be a tool to promote, protect, transmit, and often define intellectual rights over TEK or prevent its appropriation. While all these initiatives aim to preserve TEK whilst still encouraging fair and equitable sharing of benefits (as the utilization of genetic resources and associated knowledge), there is a current debate about their limitations and concerns, particularly in the open space. For instance, recent documentation efforts and data management practices fail to secure data sovereignty in a way that ensures knowledge holders’ rights, a topic of particular concern for Indigenous Peoples who hold collective rights to their knowledge (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). Current documentation efforts focus on storing, making knowledge findable, accessible, interoperable and/or reusable (FAIR) using digital and collaborative technologies (open science), a trend that does not align well with Indigenous data rights and governance rules. Moreover, their technic nature may downplay how dynamic and variable ethnobiological knowledge is. The symposium aims to provide a forum to discuss current trends in TEK documentation and preservation, and discussing tools to guide the handling of TEK in the open while respecting knowledge holder rights. We encourage the panellists to enrich the debate about these new challenges, and how local communities can have a role in the process. Communications presenting initiatives from different continents and citizen science initiatives that enhance the discussion of the risks associated with employing data and copyleft licenses are welcomed.

Speaker 1: Mauricio Diazgranados Chief Science Officer and Dean of the International Plant Science Center, The New York Botanical Garden mdiazgranados@nybg.org

Speaker 2: Victoria Reyes-García Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona & Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Victoria.Reyes@uab.cat Research on Indigenous Data Governance Protocols: A toolkit for working with Indigenous Knowledge; Victoria Reyes-García, Adrien Tofighi-Niaki, Ramin Soleymani

Speaker 3: Manuel Pardo de Santayana Departamento de Biología (Botánica), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid manuel.pardo@uam.es Spanish Inventory of Traditional Knowledge Related to Biodiversity

Topics (Up to three): Ethnobotany

Topic 2: Education and Outreach

Topic 3: Conservation Biology

Justification: Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is disappearing throughout the planet, and in an attempt to store and safeguard this information, numerous initiatives have arisen to create repositories, databases or inventories. They face, however, many challenges in terms of collection, control, access and intellectual property rights. It is a rapidly developing field, and it is therefore essential to address these issues and develop solutions as soon as possible. In this congress of international scope, we offer a platform for all initiatives and people who wish to debate and share their viewpoints on the subject, and invite scholars from all disciplines and backgrounds.