Petra Benyei

IEGD-CSIC

Projections based on agroclimatic models envision a dramatic decrease in the agricultural production at the global scale, thus affecting the livelihoods of millions of peoples. However, these models focus on the major crops and are too coarse to represent the diversity of crop species and landraces responses to climate change. CITRON is a group of 20 researchers and student who developed a unified protocol for collecting local level data that will provide first-hand information on how climate change is affecting crop diversity around the world together with other drivers, and how farmers manage to adapt.

LICCI is an ERC funded project that aims to bring insights from indigenous and local knowledge to climate research. People with a long history of interaction with the environment have developed complex knowledge systems that allow them to detect local impacts of climatic variability, but these insights are absent in climate change research and policy fora. The LICCI project will bring insights from local knowledge to climate research by 1) providing data on local climate change impacts on physical (e.g., shrinking glaciers) and biological systems (e.g., phenological changes) and on perceptions of climate change impacts on socioeconomic systems (e.g., crop failure due to rainfall patterns change) and 2) testing hypotheses on the global spatial, socioeconomic and demographic distribution of local climate change impacts indicators. The LICCI project started in June 2018 and will end in May 2023.

The importance of traditional knowledge for the conservation of biodiversity conservation has attracted interest to preserve, maintain and promote this kind of knowledge, as reflected in Article 8 (j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Pursuant Trying to comply towith this agreement, the Spanish legislation incorporateding traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as one of the fundamental components of the Spanish Inventory of Natural Heritage and Biodiversity (Royal Decree 556/2011). In this context, a group of researchers is developing the Spanish Inventory of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (IECTB), a public instrument which aims to collect traditional ecological knowledge, assess their its conservation status and vulnerability, and to make this knowledge accessible to managers, researchers, and citizens in general. In its current development, the IECTB only includes information collected by professional researchers, which limits the type of knowledge to documentdocumented, since as many of this knowledge is found only in oral form and is maintained by -mainlyprincipally- by elderly rural population. This research e CONECT-e project will develop and validate a new methodology that willould broaden the basis on which the TEK is collected while about what toengaging citizenship. Specifically, we will have developed an interactive digital wiki-like platform (www.conecte.es) that allows any citizen to both contribute their elders’ TEK -following citizen science ideas- as well as accessing information provided by other citizens. The project, lasting three years, will be developed in three phases and will focus on the collection of agroecological practicestraditional knowledge on plants, landraces, ecosystems, animals, minerals, fungus and climate change indicators. Project methodology This project will be developed in three phases. During the preparatory phase, we will design, implement and test the platform and its information validating tools. During implementation, we will use three approaches to disseminate the platform. First, the platform will be disseminated among the general public through advertising media, social networks and circles of potentially interested people. Second, we will work with a targeted group of citizens who, a priori, we consider may have already collected traditional knowledge (the Spanish seed network, Red de Semillas Resembrando e Intercambiando). Third, we will try to access elderly rural people through the younger generations. Specifically, we will work with students from agricultural technical schools (16-20 years old) in Catalonia, a region with an important rural population but also an important agricultural extension system. Comparing the quantity and quality of the data obtained by the three approaches, and the impact on the students’ perception on the value of TEK (measured with pre and post activity surveys), we will be able to evaluate this innovative tool. Finally, in the third phase we will also evaluate this methodology in terms of its ability to contribute to the IECTB and protect through a digital common’s approach this important body of knowledge.