Despite being a treasure trove of rich biodiversity and traditional plant knowledge, little of the ecological knowledge of Afro-descendent peoples in the Caribbean is recognized internationally. For the authors of a recent study published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, an eight-step action plan could rectify this scientific gap in research and policymaking, and ultimately lead to improved species conservation. In the disperse grouping of tropical islands that make up the Caribbean, traditional plant knowledge means more than knowing information about diverse plant species, the authors say. “This knowledge is how a local community relates to the environment and plants are only a part of that,” says lead author Ina Vandebroek, an ethnobotanist at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. “The whole worldview of traditional knowledge in which plants play a role is much more than that. It’s spiritual. It’s medicinal. It’s about food security and sociocultural relationships.” Knowledge of Caribbean ethnobotany has so far been limited to the scientific world, and even here little comprehensive island- or region-wide inventories of Caribbean traditional plant knowledge have been developed. According to the study, after Africans were taken from their homelands as slaves starting in the 16th century and reinvented their traditional ecological knowledge with new plants in the Caribbean, European colonists didn’t take them seriously or else appropriated their knowledge. Now, since public discourse has reframed the islands as tourism hotspots, little attention or knowledge is left of the region’s plant repertoire. Sonia Peter, an ethnobotanist and executive…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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