Paper short abstract:

Based on literature review and ethnographic study of responses to invasive Lantana camara in southern India, I present a biocultural framework for conceptualizing knowledge and information systems in human adaptation to climate induced biodiversity change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper links processes of knowledge production, acquisition, transmission, distribution and change, in interacting ecological, economic and sociocultural contexts, which ethnographic study in India demonstrated are critical to the instantiation, or lack thereof, of knowledge in human livelihood activities that are responses to climate induced biodiversity change. Important knowledge include the characteristics of the biodiversity that is changing, how it's changing and why, and how these changes affect other types of biodiversity and ecosystem processes at various scales. Social position affects who knows and how they respond. Methodologically, the research developed an innovative link between a phenomenological approach for identifying responses and abductive causal eventism for analyzing the role of knowledge, as well as ignorance, in responses. The research demonstrates that knowledge change can be both cause and consequence of biodiversity change. Losses in knowledge and practice can also have effects on the biological and ecological properties of plants, in some cases leading to loss of local landraces or species extinctions. Changes in species of habitats may have variable effects on local knowledge and cultural values and practices, and the loss of a cultural practices may lead to a cascade of losses in knowledge about species. This co-evolving and modular character of knowledge systems makes human adaptation to changes in biodiversity a much more complex issue than one might first imagine.