(Ph.D. in Anthropology, 2001, University of Florida) is ICREA Research Professor at the Institut of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and Principal Investigator of the LICCI project. Her research addresses the benefits generated by local ecological knowledge and the effects of the integration to the market economy on this type of knowledge. Reyes-García lived among the Tsimane’, an indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon, from 1999 until 2004. Between 2010-15, she coordinated a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to study the adaptive nature of culture using a cross-cultural approach. The LICCI project is under an ERC Consolidator Grant and will assess the potential contribution of indigenous and local knowledge systems to climate change impacts research.
(M.Sc. in Rural Development, 2015, Ghent University) is a Predoctoral Researcher at ICTA-UAB, researching on the use of citizen science tools to document, share, and protect traditional agroecological knowledge. She has worked in projects related to the evaluation of the South African land reform (
(Ph.D. in Production Ecology and Resource Conservation, 2015, Wageningen University) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. André has experience with interdisciplinary research in ethnoecology, traditional resource management systems, ecology of agroecosystems, and historical ecology. During his Ph.D., he focused on the use of anthropogenic soils by riverine populations in Brazilian Amazon, aiming to understand how these soils are perceived and incorporated into local livelihoods. His current research at LICCI focuses on understanding the complementarities between TEK and scientific knowledge on climate change, through analysing patterns and drivers of the correspondence between these bodies of knowledge across multiple scales.
(M.Sc. in Natural Protected Areas, 2010, Autonomous University of Madrid and M.Sc. in Sustainability Sciences for Global Change Management, 2012, International University of Andalucia) is a Predoctoral Research Fellow of the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. His main research interest lies on analysing the capacity of local ecological knowledge in order to build ecological and social resilience on a community level. He has conducted his research with rural communities in Sierra Nevada, Spain. He analysed local indicators of climate change impacts perceived by local communities in climatic, physical, biological, and socioeconomic systems, which provided more evidence that climate change impacts are producing uneven effects at local scales.
(Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology, 2017, Oregon State University) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. Her general research interest is on understanding human dimensions in natural resources. During her Ph.D., she examined Yi peoples’ (Nuosu) traditional ecological knowledge related to wild edible plants (WEPs), analysed social-ecological vulnerability and resilience in the face of agricultural transition from subsistence farming to cash cropping, and explored the impacts caused by internal migration and cash remittances. Her current research at LICCI will assess Akha peoples’ traditional ecological knowledge related to wild foods and examine the adaptation strategies to climate change through the lens of traditional ecological knowledge about wild foods in Southwest China.
(Ph.D. in Agriculture and Development Studies, 2017, Center for Development Research / ZEF Bonn, University of Bonn) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. She is a sustainability scientist with research interests in climate change policy, indigenous livelihood, and biodiversity conservation. She conducted her Ph.D. with indigenous Tagbanuas who hunt giant honey bees (Apis dorsata) in Palawan, Philippines and assessed the economic, socio-cultural, and ecological sustainability of their community forestry enterprise. Her research within LICCI will revolve around climate change vulnerability and climate risk management of indigenous agricultural practices. She is also an Associate Researcher of the Non-Timber Forest Products Exchange Programme (NTFP-EP) Asia and a Fellow of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Thematic Assessment of the Sustainable Use of Wild Species.
Encarna Poncela Fernández
(Degree in History and Diploma of Higher Specialized Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, 1998, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) is the project manager for the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. She has worked as the responsible for the management of the institutional agreements of the UAB and as a documentalist in the European Documentation Center of the UAB and also as a documentalist in an international law firm (Mullerat). In the LICCI project she is in charge of coordinating, organizing and monitoring the administrative and economic processes.
(M.Sc. in Tropical Botany and Ethnoecology, 2017, University of Montpellier & AgroParisTech and M.Eng. in Agronomy in Southern Countries, 2017, Agrocampus-Ouest & University of Curitiba) is a Predoctoral Research Fellow of the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. During his master’s degree, he worked on the ecology and regeneration of Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) in Peru (Bioversity International, CGIAR). He is actively involved in the accessibility of science, and has published a field guide for local populations in terms of identifying Brazil nut seedlings. He is particularly concerned about the resilience of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to crises. He will focus his Ph.D. on the ethnoecological knowledge of children in Madagascar in the context of global change. His work aims to understand how children’s knowledge and know-how can contribute to the livelihood strategies of their own society in the face of climate change.
(M.Sc. in Organic Agricultural Systems and Agroecology, 2018, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences of Vienna / BOKU) is a Predoctoral Research Fellow of the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. Her passion for agrobiodiversity and cultures brought her to focus on the interrelations between social and ecological systems and to understand the links between humans and nature from an interdisciplinary perspective. In her master thesis, building upon social-ecological resilience theory, she studied the changes brought by Community Seed Banks in indigenous communities of the Western highlands of Guatemala. In her Ph.D., she takes a diachronic approach to compare present and past landrace diversity and management in south-eastern Senegal to explore the potentials of local ecological knowledge in understanding and adapting to the effects of climate change.
(M.Sc. in Environmental Science, 2016, University of Potsdam) is a Predoctoral Research Fellow of the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. During her master´s studies, she has deepened her knowledge on agricultural production as a driver for future land use and climate changes. She carried out her master thesis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), where she applied a global biophysical and agroeconomical model to analyze the impacts of global dietary changes on greenhouse gas emissions. For the LICCI project, she will focus on the knowledge exchange between social and natural sciences. Her field of interest comprises the comparison of indigenous and local knowledge with results from global climate change impact modeling and the analysis of drivers and barriers for adaptation in indigenous and local communities.
(M.Sc. in Computer Science, 2010, University of Hannover) is the software engineer in the LICCI team at ICTA-UAB. He has worked in research on developing planning strategies for wireless sensor networks at the University Duisburg-Essen and worked as a Creative Technologist at the Berlin-based Service Design Agency IXDS. He also worked as a freelance software developer, educator, and artistic researcher and has been a community organizer for a digital art community in Berlin and in Barcelona. He was also an initiator and co-organizer of Science Hack Day Berlin, a community-run Hackathon for Citizen Science and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Science. Within the LICCI project he is in charge of developing the citizen science platform.
(Ph.D. in Population Biology, 2013, Montpellier SupAgro) is a researcher at the GREEN research unit in CIRAD, Montpellier, working at the interface between agroecology and ethnoecology. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at ICTA-UAB, funded by the French National Research Agency.* In the LICCI project, she is in charge of a thematic group analysing the relations between crop diversity management and climate change. Her research aims to understand how rural populations in the tropics manage plant diversity in agricultural landscapes and how to deal with the spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of their environment. She is particularly interested in understanding how biological resources and agroecological knowledge circulate through social networks and how the properties of these networks influence agroecosystems’ resilience in the face of global changes. Her current projects are based in diversified agroecosystems in Madagascar and Senegal.
* This outbound mobility grant (ID 1502-606) was funded through ANR (the French National Research Agency) under the “Investissements d’avenir” programme with the reference ANR-10-LABX-001-01 labex Agro and coordinated by Agropolis Fondation under the frame of I-SITE MUSE (ANR-16-IDEX- 0006)
External Advisor
(Dr. phil in Cultural Anthropology, 1989, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i.Br.) is the Ethics Adviser of LICCI. He is a specialist in the field of anthropologically oriented network analysis. Empirically his research focuses on Africa, India, Russia and the Caucasus. His scholarly interests are migration regimes, development anthropology, and the ethical and socio-cultural dimensions of anthropology. He also has strong methodological foundations in the field of network analysis and participatory learning and research approaches.
Research collaborators
Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares Onrubia
(Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences, 2015, Autonomous University of Barcelona) is an ethnoecologist based at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, the University of Helsinki, Finland. Most of his research focuses on the study of indigenous and local knowledge systems and the application of biocultural approaches to conservation and climate change adaptation. He has participated in international research projects in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Kenya, and Madagascar and has conducted more than 25 months of ethnographic fieldwork, mostly with Indigenous communities. He has co-authored over 35 scientific articles and is a Fellow of the IPBES Global Assessment.
(Ph.D. in Natural Resources and Life Sciences, 2016, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna) is Assistant Professor at the Department for Sustainable Agricultural Systems, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna. In his research, he focuses on ecological and socio-cultural sustainability of wild plant gathering. He adopts multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives from ethnobotany and organic farming and gained ample experience through working in several projects in European and non-European countries, rural and urban areas and on commercial and non-commercial gathering. In his collaboration with LICCI, he works on local climate-related indicators for wild plant gathering and the impact of a changing climate on gathering practices.
Partners
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| Mariam Abazeri Ecology and Anthropology Field site: Iran | Reinmar Seidler Environmental Biology Field site: India | Giulia Mattalia Environmental Sciences Field site: Bukovina, Romania/Ukraine | Fasco I. Chengula Anthropology Field site: Mafia Island, Tanzania | Joao V. Silva Ecology Field site: Brazilian Amazon region |
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| Uttam Babu Shrestha Environmental Science Field site: Nepal | Yang Jiao Anthropology Field site: Mariana Islands | Sandrine Gallois Ethnoecology Field site: Cameroon | Alick Haruhiru Science in Climate Change Field site: Solomon Islands | Aida Cuni-Sanchez Environmental Sciences Field site: Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo |
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| Yolanda Lopez-Maldonado Human Ecology and Geography Field site: Yucatan, Mexico | Andrea Izquierdo Biology Field site: Puna, Argentina | Willis Okumu Social Anthropology Field site: Kenya | Elisabeth Nebie Anthropology Field site: Burkina Faso | Emmanuel Nyadzi Environmental Sciences Field site: Ghana |
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| Marcos Glauser Sociocultural Anthropology Field site: Paraguay | Rumbidzayi Chakauya Public Administration Field site: Zimbabwe | James Donald Nyamahono Ecological Sociology Field site: Dwesa-Cwebe, South Africa | Ayansina Ayanlade Geography and Applied Climatology Field site: Nigeria | Marisa Lanker Agroecology Field site: Guatemala |
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| Rosario Carmona Anthropology Fields site: Lonquimay, Chile | Juliette Mariel Tropical Ecology Field site: Madagascar | Kelsey Leonard Political Science Field site: Great Lakes, North America | Rodrigo Bulamah Anthropology Field site: Haiti | Juliana Lins Ethnobotany, Historical Ecology Field site: Brazil |
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| Simone Athayde Environmental Anthropology Field site: Brazilian Amazon and US | Priyatma Singh Biology and Climate Change Field site: Ba Province, Fiji | Alpy Sharma Environmental Sciences Field site: Himachal Pradesh, India | Dániel Babai Ecology and Cultural Anthropology Field site: Gyimes region, Romania | Eric Hirsch Anthropology / Environmental Studies Field site: Colca Valley, Arequipa Region, Peru |
Previous members
Corinne Drouin, project manager, 2018-2019
Claudia Geffner Fuenmayor, social & cultural anthropology intern, 2019
Ana Lleida Añón, social & cultural antrhopology intern, 2019
Elisabet Marcos Furones, social & cultural anthropology intern, 2019