Description
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 substantially. These relationships are multidirectional, multi-scale, and can be understood through the concept of biocultural diversity: that biological and cultural diversity are interrelated and co-evolved. This is particularly true in freshwater ecosystems, where intersecting human demands on water and biodiversity create an urgent need for social-ecological approaches to counter threatened biocultural diversity.
Drawing on existing relational frameworks and a review of 612 interdisciplinary sources, we developed a framework categorising biocultural interactions between people and freshwater fauna across seven interconnected domains from Consumptive Use, to Worldviews, Beliefs and Identities. We move away from binaries such as tangible/intangible, which segregate meaning from practice, and centre relationships rather than services, recognising these as multidirectional, reciprocal and not quantifiable.
The framework functions as a translating lens connecting species, the unit of natural science, to ethnospecies, the units by which communities conceptualise fauna. the units by which communities conceptualise fauna. This raises questions central to this session: what categorisation granularity is possible across epistemic contexts, how category overlap that reflects real-world plurality should be treated, and how relational, qualitative meaning can interface with more structured, quantitative data. The framework is a worked example of addressing relationships that resist quantification, a challenge future knowledge infrastructures must confront.
| Topic | Topic 1: : Methods for integrating social and ecological knowledge |
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