Integrative Social-Ecological Knowledge Systems: Conceptual and Computational Foundations for Ecological Synthesis

Accepted Contributions

32. A biocultural framework for categorising human-freshwater fauna interactions for social-ecological integration

Talk

Integrating social-ecological knowledge requires conceptual frameworks able to hold culturally-embedded, often intangible relationships between people and species alongside conventional ecological data, without flattening meaning or losing interpretability. Such knowledge remains scattered across disciplines that rarely share a vocabulary, even where the phenomena described overlap...

3. A global synthesis of herbivorous crop pests and their natural enemies using large language models

Talk

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a novel tool for knowledge extraction and evidence synthesis in a wide range of scientific disciplines, including ecology and conservation science. Whilst many taxa have been classified based on traits or the provision of ecosystem functions, taxonomic and geographic coverage is sparse, and knowledge of interactions between species,...

2. Adding context to network graphs to improve understanding of ecological theory and data

Poster

Network approaches are powerful tools to synthesize, connect, and visualise both ecological theory and data to improve understanding of real-world ecological systems and support management decisions. However, network approaches often lack context-dependence which limits their generalizability. I will present two case studies demonstrating how I have approached adding context to network graphs...

27. Bridging Knowledge Systems for Adaptive Social–Ecological Governance: Synthesizing Scientific, Indigenous, and Local Knowledge in India’s Biodiversity Hotspots

Talk

This paper develops an integrative framework that combines scientific, Indigenous, and local knowledge to strengthen biodiversity conservation and adaptive governance in India’s Sundarbans and Western Ghats, two globally significant social–ecological systems facing climate vulnerability, biodiversity loss, and livelihood pressures. Although community-based conservation increasingly recognizes...

1. Bridging the Evidence Gap: A Collaborative Question-Ranking Workshop for EcoWeaver

Proposal for a Working Group/Contribution to a Working Group

Restoration ecology often suffers from a disconnect between the availability of scientific evidence and the specific, site-level questions faced by practitioners. While high-level syntheses provide general guidance, practitioners frequently require precise answers to localized problems—for example, "What is the most effective method for managing European Buckthorn in a Carolinian grassland?"...

31. Building Ecological Knowledge Graphs: Lessons from CAMO Annotation

Poster

Ecological knowledge is distributed across many formats, making findings difficult to compare and synthesize. The Causal Mosaic Schema (CAMO) is one approach to synthesize findings as structured data grounded in philosophical understanding. CAMO is being explored as part of EcoWeaver, an initiative to build a machine-readable knowledge base of ecological restoration findings that will allow...

12. Challenges and options for synthesis and extrapolation for ecosystem restoration outcomes at landscape level

Talk

To conserve biodiversity, ecosystem functions and nature’s contributions to people (NCPs) in agricultural landscapes, ecosystem restoration measures are implemented mainly targeting processes at different spatial and temporal levels. Analytically, the focus is often to assess past impacts of restoration measures for different taxa and different NCPs and underlying ecosystem functions. These...

35. Challenges and risks when weaving ecological ideas

Proposal for a Working Group/Contribution to a Working Group

The ongoing environmental risks put urgency in the use and development of AI tools to support and improve ecosystem management. Still, rushing the development of such a tool may unintentionally cause more harm if not done properly. We discuss two challenges that should be carefully considered when planning a fully functional EcoWeaver model.
First, training AI systems risks incorporating...

9. Context-dependent coexistence of social parasites: fungus-growing ant communities as a case study

Talk

Parasite virulence (i.e. the harm caused by parasites to host survival and fitness) shapes host-parasite dynamics in both pathogenic and social parasites. While high virulence can paradoxically limit parasite persistence, outcomes are context dependent, sometimes even turning parasites into net mutualists. The fungus-growing ants (Myrmicinae: Attini) are part of a well-studied symbiotic...

33. Contextualizing Ecological Synthesis: Indigenous Knowledge, Stewardship, and Environmental Archives

Talk

Ecological synthesis increasingly brings together diverse knowledge sources, yet synthesis can lose meaning when knowledge is separated from the contexts in which it is held, governed, and applied. This is especially important when Indigenous Knowledge is involved, where context also includes relationships to place, community priorities, consent, stewardship responsibilities, Indigenous Data...

22. EcoGraphRAG: Causal Evidence Graphs for Grounded Ecological Synthesis

Talk

Ecological synthesis is increasingly difficult not only due to the growing volume of ecological literature, but also because evidence is deeply contextual. A claim about range shifts or niche change depends on the taxon, habitat, method, driver, or response under consideration. Standard retrieval-augmented generation can retrieve relevant text but often leaves this structure implicit. We...

18. EU AI Act and implications for Global South Conservation governance: The regulatory classification of AI-based ecological synthesis tools

Poster

The use of AI tools for knowledge synthesis, such as the large language model and knowledge graph, has been proposed as a solution to ecological knowledge fragmentation, which combines field data, models, and socio-economic information to enable causal inferences to be made about social-ecological systems. The EU AI Act was not established to come into effect within the regulatory landscape as...

30. Evaluating LLMs for Causal-Evidence Auditing in Ecology Literature: A Case Study on Biotic Resistance to Plant Invasions

Talk

Often scientific papers use conceptual causal diagrams to represent complex relationships. In ecology papers, these causal graphs can be used to depict species interactions, environmental conditions, ecological processes, etc. However, determining whether each of the causal relationships in such diagrams is strongly supported by the cited literature is difficult because the evidence is...

6. FAIR, CLEAR, and Causal: A Semantic Framework for Ecological Knowledge Synthesis

Talk

Ecological synthesis produces knowledge that is human-interpretable but rarely machine-actionable. Attempts to address this through RDF/OWL-based semantic representations introduce a new problem: structures become opaque even to domain experts. We present the Semantic Units Framework, a modular approach to structuring ecological data and knowledge as logic-aware, independently addressable...

23. Indigenous and local knowledge-weaving: territorial perspectives from Chile

Proposal for a Working Group/Contribution to a Working Group

In light of the global and local social-ecological crises, Indigenous and Local Knowledge, also known as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ILK/TEK), is frequently evoked as an essential source of experiences and practices that should be, in some way, integrated and intertwined with Western approaches to ecology. Rightly so, as Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities have long been stewards of...

10. Indigenous data sovereignty in computational ecological knowledge integration

Proposal for a Working Group/Contribution to a Working Group

Evidence synthesis in ecology increasingly integrates diverse knowledge sources, yet often overlooks Indigenous data sovereignty and community governance rights. This session presents three interconnected elements.
First, we present recent findings from a Nature Communications paper applying the CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) to evidence...

14. Integrating Heterogeneous Ecological Knowledge to Improve Automated Moth Species Classification

Poster

Over the past three decades, flying insect biomass has declined by more than 75% in protected areas, highlighting the urgency of monitoring insect populations. Moths represent approximately 9% of all known species on Earth and are among the most affected insect groups, despite their important roles as pollinators and food sources. Automated nocturnal light recorders are increasingly used to...

34. Integrating Spatial Analysis and Community Knowledge for Evidence-Based Forest Landscape Restoration in Southern Nigeria

Talk

Effective Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) requires decision-making that integrates ecological evidence with the knowledge, priorities, and socioeconomic realities of local communities. In this study, geospatial analysis and community-derived socioeconomic evidence were integrated within the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM) to support restoration planning in the Okomu...

28. Interweaving Western and Indigenous Water Knowledges on Rivers

Proposal for a Working Group/Contribution to a Working Group

The Blue Humanities have recently emerged as a subfield of Ecocriticism replacing land-centered knowledge systems and semantic frameworks through water-centered approaches of knowing and being in the world. Various countries are now acknowledging rivers as persons with inalienable rights. Such a process is often set in motion by local indigenous groups that use mythologies, situated...

15. Knowledge-Guided Species Classification with Multimodal Large Language Models

Talk

Biodiversity monitoring provides the systematic measurements required to assess ecosystem health, predict environmental collapse, and inform global conservation efforts. A key component is the automatic classification of species from image data, where recent deep learning methods have achieved remarkable performance. However, distinguishing visually similar species based on fine-grained...

11. LLM-based generation of spatiotemporal knowledge graphs for ecological synthesis

Talk

In ecology, systematic reviews and meta-analyses are important methods to synthesize scientific evidence. They allow to qualitatively and quantitatively integrate large bodies of literature to investigate cross-study research questions. Ecological evidence is described by numerous interrelated and complementary entities, many of which are associated with spatial and temporal information. Those...

21. Navigating research diversity in ecological synthesis: the role of openness and machine actionability

Talk

Multiple research fields from a range of disciplines contribute - each in their own ways - to the study of ecological systems and their internal and external interactions. Attempts at synthesizing the various contributions within and across fields into a coherent body of knowledge thus have to take into account the diversity of ways in which these fields perform, organize and share research....

25. Re-imagining rivers' social-ecological future by centering nonhuman perspectives: A multispecies role-playing game

Poster

Riverscapes are socio-ecological systems where human and nonhuman entities co-create and co-transform. However, anthropocentric water governance frameworks have long treated water as a “resource” or “service,” leaving nonhuman entities with no agency and dependent on human decisions for protection. Innovative participatory approaches like role-playing games (RPGs) offer experimental spaces for...

19. Reference Tracking of “Uncertainty” in Ecological Research

Proposal for a Working Group/Contribution to a Working Group

Following the breakout session in November 2025, this proposal asks one question: when "Uncertainty" is grounded in ecologists' first-hand research cases rather than imposed by theory, what does it actually refer to and can a formal ontology recover those referents across different cases, or does it break down?
The group runs in two sessions. In the first session (ideally situated at the...

13. Restoration ecology as a poietic practice

Talk

Thinking about causality has almost always conceptualised humans as knowers distant from the things known. This has informed our causal methodologies, including the experimental methodologies which are still considered our best methods. Even where separating ourselves from the target system is difficult, methodologies advise as much separation as possible. However, this conception is no good...

24. social–ecological networks for biodiversity and ecosystem services

Talk

The demand the human population is placing on the environment has triggered accelerated rates of biodiversity change and created trade-offs among the ecosystem services we depend upon. Decisions designed to reverse these trends require the best possible information obtained by monitoring ecological and social dimensions of change. Here, I present a social–ecological network framework and...

29. Talking to Ontologies: Making Scientific Knowledge Accessible through MCP

Ontologies are widely used across scientific domains, e.g. life sciences and materials science to organize complex knowledge and describe relationships between concepts, data, and processes. However, accessing this knowledge often requires familiarity with ontology engineering, specialized terminology, or query languages such as SPARQL. This can limit the use of ontologies by researchers and...

5. The LIB Open Knowledge Space: A semantic architecture for FAIR, CLEAR, and AI-ready biodiversity knowledge

Talk

Natural history collections risk remaining isolated archives unless their data and knowledge are transformed into connected, semantically structured, and machine-actionable resources. The LIB Open Knowledge Space is a planned FAIR-, CARE-, and CLEAR-compliant knowledge infrastructure. It is central to the data and knowledge science strategy of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of...

7. The TripleA Principle: Actionability, Applicability, and Auditability for Actionable Knowledge in Post-FAIR Infrastructures

Talk

The FAIR Principles have made biodiversity data findable, accessible, and interoperable, but not operationally usable. A critical layer is missing between semantic representation and context-sensitive action, one that distinguishes the structural capacity of a knowledge representation to support operations (actionability) from the epistemic reliability of using it in a specific context...

26. Theoretical Syntheses based on model use: How to go from "snapshots" of current theories to "films" of how theories develop.

Talk

A pragmatic scientific theory is the conceptual basis that a group of scientists uses to conduct their scientific activities. This notion implies a definition of scientific theory based on what, from all available knowledge, scientists use to support their research. In other words, the theory is what scientists are using.

The recently published Pragmatic Approach to Theories is a method to...

8. TIB Knowledge Loom: Publishing Analysis-ready Scientific Knowledge to Accelerate Synthesis Research

Talk

Ecological research increasingly relies on integrating heterogeneous knowledge sources that are fragmented across disciplines, conceptual frameworks, and data infrastructures. This fragmentation is compounded by the fact that, despite significant advances in digital technologies, scientific results are still primarily communicated in text-based formats that machines cannot interpret without...

20. Traditional Ecological Knowledge System and Resource Degradation Nexus: Insights from Ngoketunjia, North West Region, Cameroon

Poster

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM AND RESOURCE DEGRADATION NEXUS: INSIGHTS FROM NGOKETUNJIA, NORTH WEST REGION, CAMEROON

NUGAH Alvina NYALUM (PhD Student) Department of Geography and Planning, the University of Bamenda.
The traditional ecological Knowledge (TEK) of the Mbororo pastoralists is the cornerstone guiding resource management, adapting to environmental aspects especially...

4. You ask iAnswer: How Knowledge Graphs and LLMs combine in an accessible and reliable Question-Answering tool for Ecological Research Data

Talk

Recent advances in AI promise new possibilities for knowledge integration, synthesis, and dissemination. However, novel AI systems must produce reliable answers if researchers and stakeholders want to make trustworthy claims, predictions, and decisions. Carefully curated Knowledge Graphs can be the key for this reliability, as they represent research data in a machine-readable, -interpretable,...