Understanding plant significance across cultures and borders is a driving goal in ethnobotany. Often, empirical studies aim to highlight and explain variation in plant knowledge and uses between communities across national, geographic, and cultural boundaries. However, such studies underinvestigate commonality of values and practices between communities. In this cross-border study of highland pastoral communities in both Caucasian Georgia and Turkey, we propose and implement an approach that synthesizes Cultural Importance (CI) and Identified Cultural Importance (ICI) indices. We label this method a “Unified Cultural Keystone Species (UCKS)” approach. We demonstrate that such an approach is uniquely capable of perceiving shared Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and practices across cultures and borders. Our results identify three primary Cultural Keystone Species (CKS) that cut across cultural and political boundaries in the Western Lesser Caucasus. We argue that these findings allow for a more comprehensive understanding of ethnobotanical knowledge and practices in the study area. This, in turn, can enhance conservation and restoration strategies in the study region and beyond by highlighting the breadth of biocultural knowledge and value held within shared traditions and landscapes. By so doing, we show a way to heighten scientific perceptions of the importance of cultural and linguistic connections to environmental well-being in specific places.

The ability to name plants is part of one's theoretical botanical knowledge, which is neither static nor presented equally among all members of a cultural group. This article analyzes the intracultural variation of knowledge in the cultural domain of edible plant species among a rural population of western Mexico. We evaluate individuals' capacity to name plants, the salience of each plant, children's sources of this knowledge, and the socioeconomic factors that influence the amount of knowledge held. Freelists on local edible plant species were generated from 107 participants, including 37 children of middle childhood (MC), 27 preteens (PT), and 43 adults (A). A total of 102 species were mentioned across the lists for all three age groups. While each age and gender group presented variation in the species mentioned, a high level of overlap was found among the salient species. Group A mentioned twice the number of wild species as the PT and MC groups. Vertical knowledge transmission was more important for the children, and their ability to name the species differed significantly according to age, gender, and mother's occupation. Children with farmer-housewife mothers listed five more species on average than those with mothers in other occupational groups. The children listed fewer plants than adults, indicating differences between age groups and indicating the need for future studies to evaluate the factors that influence the transmission of knowledge amidst socioenvironmental changes.

The Neotropical rodent agouti (Dasyprocta sp.), arguably one of the most prominent pre-Contact introduced commensals of the Lesser Antilles, has long been proposed as having been managed and maintained in captivity by Indigenous Caribbean groups. These claims, however, remain so far unsubstantiated. Ethnohistoric texts may serve as valuable resources for establishing the commensal relationships agouti shared with Indigenous Caribbean groups. Here, I synthesize the evidence from seventeenth century French ethnohistoric texts to address the question of pre-Contact agouti management and captivity and concretize some of the many other commensal relationships linking agouti to Indigenous groups. Ethnohistoric texts reveal that, in addition to having been managed through garden hunting, agoutis occurred as tame, in close proximity to settlements, although they do not appear to have been maintained in captivity. Agoutis also occurred as detached from human settlements, maintaining minimal interaction with human groups. Ethnohistoric texts repeatedly associate agoutis and agouti skeletal elements with ritual practices, suggesting ceremonial/cosmological value. This study shows that ethnohistoric texts hold critical potential for substantiating pre-Contact commensal relationships and, by extension, may offer insight into Indigenous identities and lifeways, and island ecology.

In Sweden, fire management is driven by nature conservation objectives through both regeneration burning, used as a soil preparation method in forestry, and conservation burning in protected forests, aiming to reintroduce fire as an ecological process necessary for the preservation of biodiversity. The burning strategy affects Indigenous Sami reindeer herders who use commercial and protected forestlands as pastures for their reindeer. Fire can have ambivalent effects on reindeer pasture depending on where it occurs. Yet, Sami herders are currently not included in the planning process of burning but for a consultation by forest owners occurring late in the process. In this article, we interpret fire management as a system of fire domestication, understood as continuous interactions between humans and fire. To describe the modalities of contemporary fire domestication, our study draws on semi-structured interviews carried out with Sami reindeer herders, forestry planners, conservation managers, and burning practitioners in different localities of the northernmost counties of Västerbotten and Norrbotten. We show how the domestication of fire involves a dual negotiation process: a negotiation with fire during the burning process, and a negotiation about fire between Sami herders and forest managers. Burning practitioners conceive fire as an agent rather than a tool, able to produce unique effects in forests and increase their naturalness, which they must steer in order to reach desired ecological results. Through the negotiation of the use of fire, fire domestication stimulates new interactions between Sami herders and forest managers, and constitutes a possible common ground from which new forms of collaboration could emerge. Our study reaffirms the hybrid nature of fire, both natural and cultural, resulting from negotiations with and between the human actors of the domestication system.

Remote Amazonian communities are often largely self-sufficient, made possible in part by their agricultural skills and deep ecological knowledge of their landscapes. Mastery of their local flora undoubtedly plays a vital role in daily life, yet communities in the Amazon can vary widely in both the diversity of plants that they utilize and in how they manage plants in their agricultural landholdings. The dominant drivers of these differences in ecological knowledge and practices between communities are not clearly understood. We compare the agricultural practices and diversity of utilized plants in an Indigenous Urarina community and a Mestizo community in the Peruvian Amazon. Through field surveys and farmer interviews, we assessed the diversity of utilized plants found in the homegardens (N = 17) and chacras (cropped fields; N = 47), as well as multiple agricultural characteristics of the chacras and fallow fields (N = 32). Households from the Mestizo community cultivated a larger land area, while both communities utilized relatively short fallow times of < 6 years. Across both communities, farmers make use of a total of 207 plant species belonging to 60 plant families for various resources, including food, spices, medicine, fuel, craft, construction, hunting/fishing, and spiritual/cultural uses. Species diversity of utilized plants was significantly higher in the Urarina community, likely reflecting their longer historical roots in the region, lower reliance on a market economy, greater reliance on farm and forest products, and higher degree of biocultural relationship to the land. Kin size was negatively correlated with homegarden diversity, while increasing household wealth led to more species diversity in Urarina landholdings, but less diversity in Mestizo landholdings. These results suggest that both Mestizo and Indigenous communities, and especially the latter, play an important role in the conservation of traditional ecological knowledge and agrobiodiversity in the Peruvian Amazon; however, increasing market integration may jeopardize the biocultural relationships that undergird this in situ conservation.

Paiwan Indigenous communities of Southern Taiwan have historically used bird feathers to decorate their headdresses. Among many species, the feathers of the Mountain Hawk-Eagle (Nisaetus nipalensis), qadis or adis in the Paiwan language, play an especially crucial role. In this paper, we aim to understand the relationship between the Paiwan and the qadis as well as the evolution of knowledge, practices, and beliefs regarding qadis feathers over time. We engaged Paiwan feather culture through analysis of legends, vocabularies, stories, accounts of feather utilization, and changes in modern society. Interviewees provided the names of various feathers, their link to social identities, and the way of wearing them. We visited 44 villages and interviewed 123 Paiwan elders and tribal chiefs to collect the local names of the feathers and of the different anatomical parts of qadis. We also recorded the taboos, limitations, rituals, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) associated with qadis hunting. Traditionally, the qadis is deemed a sacred bird and its feathers on a headdress symbolize the special status of a tribal chief, noble person, or hero. We apply our findings to help scientists understand feather culture and to find better conservation strategies that are responsive to local culture.