Olivia Sylvester

University for Peace · Environment and Development

Strongly emerging Indigenous methodologies have attracted researchers to employ diverse research paradigms within a moral commitment to conducting research based on ethical sensitivities and appropriate research protocols, as informed by research work with marginalized and unfamiliar groups including Indigenous Communities. However, adopting Indige...

Analysis of the patterns of distribution, diversity, uses, and conservation status of the palm flora of Costa Rica.

This conceptual paper reflexively explores an emerging turn towards a dialectic engagement in the development of Indigenous methodologies, using insights from Bourdieu and Foucault in the deconstruction of discourses regarding hierarchies of positionalities, which are associated with the construction of epistemic authority. The paper draws on examp...

The Covid-19 pandemic has compounded the global food insecurity crisis, disproportionately afecting the consumers, farmers, and food workers (UN in Policy brief: impacts of COVID-19 on food security and nutrition, 2020, https://www. un.org/sites/un2.un.org/fles/sg_policy_brief_on_covid_impact_on_food_security.pdf). The signifcant disruptions cause...

Introduction: The Covid-19 pandemic has led to increased awareness of food security in urban areas and to the role of farmers’ markets in providing essential services to consumers. Objective: To better understand how Covid-19 affected consumer access to organic food at two major organic farmers’ markets in the Costa Rican metropolitan area. Methods...

Gerardo Avalos, Olivia Sylvester, Milena Cambronero, Alí García-Segura Abstract. Costa Rica has one of the highest species concentrations in the world. The estimated number of species of all organisms is 500,000, which represents 5% of the world's biodiversity. This country has 111 palm species (approximately 4.26% of the world's total), of which...

La agricultura se ve a menudo como un espacio masculino. En las reuniones de organización agrícola, tiendas de suministros o ferias, la mayoría de los participantes y profesionales son hombres. Esta no es la forma natural, sino una construcción social de que los hombres pertenecen en el campo y las mujeres en el hogar, cuidando de los hombres que h...

In agroecology, women’s activities, from seed saving to activism, are well documented. Less well described are the factors that support and/or hinder women’s participation in agroecology; we addressed this gap through a feminist analysis of women’s motivations and barriers to participation in agroecological production in Costa Rica. We found that w...

This article represents our collective reflexivity in the process of applying an Indigenous methodology in a North–South, cross-cultural collaboration, funded through the British Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund. The projects’ aim was to bring together Bribri and Jakun leaders (from Costa Rica and Malaysia) for constructive dialogues ab...

Achieving sustainable agriculture and food security for all is one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. The United Nations 2018 State of the World’s Food Security Report speaks to this challenge. Specifically, this report describes that recently the number of undernourished people in the world has been on the rise, after a prolonged...

Tropical palms reach tree-like heights without a vascular cambium through sustained cell expansion and lignification of primary tissues, but only a fraction of palms have been explored in their allometric relationships. Here, our main question was to determine how palms depart from the traditional mechanical models developed for trees and how they...

A summary of regarding

Although there is a growing interest in Indigenous research, education regarding how to put Indigenous research into practice is not often part of academic training. To increase the awareness of how Indigenous methodologies can be applied to academic research, we describe how we used Bribri Indigenous teachings to develop a Ph.D. research methodolo...

This article describes a sustainable agriculture workshop designed and led by Master's students to support university-community engagement in Costa Rica. Our project had three transformative goals: 1) to empower Master's students as educators, 2) to share food security knowledge with community youth, and 3) to strengthen our university-community re...

We contribute to a growing body of literature on wild food harvesting by examining culturally specific relationships with wild food, the extent and frequency of wild food use in forests, and young people’s wild food consumption. We gathered qualitative data in the Talamanca Bribri Territory, Costa Rica, using participant observation, interviews, an...

International protected area (PA) management policies recognise the importance of respecting Indigenous rights. However, little research has been conducted to evaluate how these policies are being enforced. We evaluated whether Indigenous rights to access traditional food were being respected in La Amistad Biosphere Reserve, Costa Rica. By examinin...

The gendered dimensions of wild food harvesting are often examined at the resource appropriation stage; to build on this literature, we examined gender and wild food harvesting across multiple wild harvesting stages from pre-harvest to food sharing. Using qualitative methods (participation, interviews, and group discussions) informed by Bribri Indi...

The gendered dimensions of wild food harvesting are often examined at the resource appropriation stage; to build on this literature, we examined gender and wild food harvesting across multiple wild harvesting stages from pre-harvest to food sharing. Using qualitative methods (participation, interviews, and group discussions) informed by Bribri Indi...

There is a vast literature on Bribri people's food harvesting, but this literature has largely overlooked how Bribri people interpret their food harvesting practices. Using a landscape ethnoecology approach, we worked with Bribri colleagues to describe forest food harvesting in one community (Bajo Coen) within the Talamanca Bribri Indigenous Territ...

2013. Anishinaabe adaptation to environmental change in northwestern Ontario: a case study in knowledge coproduction for nontimber forest products. Ecology and Society 18(4): ABSTRACT. Interaction, negotiation, and sharing knowledge are at the heart of indigenous response to global environmental change. We consider Anishinaabe efforts to devise new...

Knowledge on the growth responses of understory palms to changing light conditions within neotropical cloud forests is limited. The low light regime of these environments, in addition to persistent cloudiness, low ambient temperatures, and slow nutrient cycles, imposes significant constraints on biomass accumulation. Here, we evaluate how changes i...

To support the implementation of policies that recognize human uses of wild plants, we documented palm ethnobotany within or bordering eight protected areas in Costa Rica. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 37 participants from 18 communities, we documented the cultivation and harvest of 32 palm species from 21 gene...

We estimated the magnitude of the total leaf area of the neotropical palm Euterpe oleracea and examined its allometry relative to the variation in stem height and diameter at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. The allometric relationships between frond leaf area and frond length (from tip to base), and between frond leaf area and number of...

Illegal Palm Heart (Geonoma edulis) Harvest in Costa Rican National Parks: Patterns of Consumption and Extraction. Illegal extraction of non-timber forest products in the tropics is widespread, and many protected areas face the challenge of balancing conservation needs with cultural practices related to the use and extraction of animals and plants....

Illegal extraction of non-timber forest products in the tropics is widespread and many protected areas face the challenge of balancing conservation needs with cultural practices related to the use and extraction of animals and plants. We studied the illegal wild palm heart extraction of Geonoma edulis, locally known as súrtuba, in Volcán Poás and B...

Palms represent one of the most conspicuous groups of Angiosperms in Tropical Forests. Although their contribution to overall species diversity is small, they influence forest structure and dynamics, and play an essential role in foodwebs. The distribution of palms reflects fine shifts in environmental heterogeneity and light availability. In arbor...