Advancing ethnobiology for the ecological transition and a more inclusive and just world: a comprehensive framework for the next 20 years.

This opinion piece, written by ethnobiologists from different parts of the world, emphasizes the importance of ethnobiology research in advancing contemporary biology, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, sustainable development, and, especially, contributing to the ecological transition and more just and inclusive world. To achieve these goals, it is essential to develop research and collaborate with social groups that live in close relationship with nature in research activities, such as Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC), as well as Afro-descendants and other Marginalized, Minority or Minoritized Communities (AMMC). Ethnobiology can identify and provide locally appropriate solutions to local problems, enabling sustainable resource management at the landscape level. The text explores important aspects that need to be considered to guide the future of ethnobiology in the next 20 years, aiming to integrate and amplify previous discussions held in the discipline and identify points that demand ongoing attention. This paper highlights reflections from diverse researchers, emphasizing how ethnobiology can embrace different perspectives and employ rigorous analysis of complex phenomena toward effective policies and practices. This approach holds the potential to address the challenges the planet is currently facing in the coming decades.

Integrating depth and rigor in ethnobiological and ethnomedical research.

Ethnobiology and ethnomedicine, traditionally descriptive disciplines chronicling Indigenous People and Local Community (IPLC) practices, face the challenge of incorporating hypothesis-driven research to address contemporary issues. This paper argues for a synergistic approach where both approaches are valued for their unique contributions to understanding human-nature interactions and informing policy.

Interactions between local medical systems and the biomedical system: a conceptual and methodological review in light of hybridization subprocesses.

Local medical systems (LMSs) are complex and dynamic, encompassing local perceptions of diseases, prevention and treatment strategies, and evaluations of therapeutic responses. These systems are not isolated and interact with other medical systems, such as the biomedical system. The interaction between these systems creates a "contact zone", which some authors refer to as intermedicality, involving both competitive and complementary interactions. However, there is limited discussion in the literature regarding the complexity of these interactions. Some studies seek to understand this interaction through the lens of hybridization, a concept introduced to ethnobiology by Ana Ladio and Ulysses Albuquerque. The authors conceptualize hybridization as "discrete structures and practices coming together to form a new practice not necessarily implying homogenization." They discuss hybridization in the context of medicinal plants used in urban settings and propose seven hybridization subprocesses to gain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. In this study, we update these hybridization subprocesses, expanding the concepts to comprehend the specific interaction of resources from LMS and biomedical systems known and used by different human groups. In this context, we propose a new subprocess and have made adjustments to the existing subprocesses to encompass the diversity of possible interactions between medicinal plants and pharmaceuticals, providing evidence from the literature demonstrating interactions that can be classified within the proposed subprocesses. Furthermore, we discuss, from a theoretical standpoint, how these subprocesses may have implications for the resilience of medical systems. Moreover, we propose a flowchart that can be utilized to identify these hybridization subprocesses in intermedicality contexts in future studies. These classifications are crucial because they enable us to comprehend the complexity of interactions between medicinal plants and pharmaceuticals, as well as the impacts that these different interactions can have on the resilience of LMSs.

Perception of health risks in contexts of extreme climate change in semiarid Northeastern Brazil: an analysis of the role of socioeconomic variables.

BACKGROUND: Global climate change poses a significant challenge in contemporary society, particularly affecting vulnerable populations like small farmers residing in arid and semiarid regions. This study aims to investigate the perception of health risks and adaptive responses in the semiarid region of Northeast Brazil (NEB). Four questions were formulated: (1) How do socioeconomic factors influence the perception of health risks during extreme climate events? (2) How do socioeconomic factors impact the adoption of adaptive responses to mitigate health risks during extreme weather events? (3) How does the perceived risk level affect the utilization of adaptive responses? (4) What is the influence of extreme climate events on the perceived risks and the adoption of adaptive responses? METHOD: The research was conducted in the rural community of Carão, situated in the Agreste region of the State of Pernambuco, NEB. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 49 volunteers aged 18 and above. The interviews aimed to gather socioeconomic information, including sex, age, income, access to healthcare services, family size, and education level. Additionally, the interviews explored the perceived risks and responses employed during different extreme climate events such as droughts or heavy rainfall. The perceived risks and adaptive responses data were quantified to address the research questions. Generalized linear models were employed to analyze the data for the first three questions, while the nonparametric Mann-Whitney test was used for the fourth question. RESULTS: The study found no significant differences in the level of perceived risk and adaptive responses between the two climate extremes. However, the quantity of adaptive responses was found to be directly influenced by the perceived risks, regardless of the type of extreme climate event. CONCLUSION: The study concludes that risk perception is influenced by various complex factors, including socioeconomic variables, and plays a critical role in the adoption of adaptive responses during extreme climate events. The findings suggest that specific socioeconomic variables have a more pronounced influence on how individuals perceive and adapt to risks. Furthermore, the results indicate a cause-and-effect relationship between perceived risks and the generation of adaptive responses. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the factors shaping risk perception and provide valuable insights for future studies in regions prone to extreme climate events.

Exploring Large Digital Bodies for the Study of Human Behavior.

Internet access has become a fundamental component of contemporary society, with major impacts in many areas that offer opportunities for new research insights. The search and deposition of information in digital media form large sets of data known as digital corpora, which can be used to generate structured data, representing repositories of knowledge and evidence of human culture. This information offers opportunities for scientific investigations that contribute to the understanding of human behavior on a large scale, reaching human populations/individuals that would normally be difficult to access. These tools can help access social and cultural varieties worldwide. In this article, we briefly review the potential of these corpora in the study of human behavior. Therefore, we propose Culturomics of Human Behavior as an approach to understand, explain, and predict human behavior using digital corpora.

Biodiversity is overlooked in the diets of different social groups in Brazil.

Food biodiversity is essential for improving nutrition and reducing hunger in populations worldwide. However, in middle and low-income countries, the biodiversity of food production does not necessarily represent food consumption patterns by population. We used Brazil, one of the world's megabiodiverse countries, as a case study to investigate the following questions: what is the prevalence of consumption of biodiverse foods in Brazil, and what are the socioeconomic factors that influence their consumption throughout the country? We used data from a Brazilian representative national dietary survey to estimate the frequency of food consumption of unconventional food plants, edible mushrooms, and wild meat, in according to socioeconomic variables. Thus, we investigated the socioeconomic predictors of Unconventional Food Plants consumption using methods of Machine Learning (ML) and multiple zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression. We showed that biodiverse food consumption in Brazil is low, just related by 1.3% of the population, varying in according to area, ethnicity, age, food insecurity, sex, and educational level. Our findings of low utilization of biodiversity suggest an important mismatch between the rich biodiversity of the country and its representation in the human diet.

Does prestige bias influence the recall and transmission of COVID-19-related information? Protocol registration for an experimental study conducted online.

In epidemic and pandemic contexts, such as that of COVID-19, epidemiological changes are continuous, and many people do not have access to accurate, up-to-date information. In this context, social learning can be an advantageous survival strategy. We investigate whether people remember and communicate information attributed to someone prestigious more often than that attributed to family members, politicians, and people with experience in public health. The experimental phase will include a recall stage and an information transmission stage, which will be based on a fictitious text containing an opinion about a drug treatment for COVID-19. There will be four versions of the text, and each participant will be assigned one of these versions for the investigation. The participants will be instructed to read the fictional story and then complete a distraction exercise. Subsequently, a recall test will be performed, where they will be asked to recount the story as accurately as possible. The second stage of the experiment is aimed at testing the transmission of information where we will conduct a linear chain transmission experiment, where eight chains of four participants will be used for each story. They will be asked to write down their recollection of the material. This text will undergo spelling error correction and then be sent to the next participant in the chain through the platform. At the end of the experiment, there will be a self-reporting questionnaire for the participants; this allows for triangulation of the data.

Easy Access to Biomedicine and Knowledge about Medicinal Plants: A Case Study in a Semiarid Region of Brazil.

We aimed to evaluate how proximity to urban areas interferes with the relationship between socioeconomic variables and various aspects of medicinal plant knowledge. The study was conducted in six communities of the Catimbau National Park (PARNA Catimbau) in the state of Pernambuco. Eighty participants were interviewed. The communities were divided into two groups according to their distance from the nearest urban center. Socioeconomic data and information on medicinal plants were collected through semistructured interviews. Subsequently, generalized linear models were generated to verify the influence of the interaction between the variables on medicinal knowledge. We observed that proximity to the urban center influenced the relationship between the level of education and the knowledge of body systems treated by medicinal plants. We concluded that environmental variables can generate a differentiated effect on the influence of socioeconomic factors on one's knowledge of medicinal plants.

Short-term temporal analysis and children's knowledge of the composition of important medicinal plants: the structural core hypothesis.

BACKGROUND: Measures of the importance of medicinal plants have long been used in ethnobotany and ethnobiology to understand the influence of social-ecological system factors in the formation of individuals' differential knowledge and use. However, there is still a gap in empirical studies that seek to understand the temporal aspects of this process. METHODS: To overcome this issue, we used the concept of the structural core of medicinal plants, a theoretical-evolutionary model, which argues that the importance of medicinal plant resources is related to the increase in individual and population fitness. It represents the set of the most effective and available resources that would treat the most common diseases in an environment. This composition of knowledge would be conservative over space and time. To test these questions, we hypothesized that the composition of the structural core remains constant during temporal changes in a social-ecological context, and that the composition of the infantile structural core (new generation) is similar to that of the adults (older generation). For 2 years, we tracked the structure of important medicinal plants among the same 49 residents of a community located in Vale do Catimbau in Pernambuco, Brazil. We also compared the importance of the medicinal plants among two different generations, children/adolescents and adults, in the same space/time context. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Our results refuted both hypotheses. Regarding the composition of important medicinal plants through temporal variations and for children's learning, our results were not predicted by the model. This suggests that the structural core should not be regarded as a conservative phenomenon, but rather a congenital, dynamic, and plastic occurrence that has adapted to configure itself as a short-term population response to the treatment of local diseases.

Culture matters: A systematic review of antioxidant potential of tree legumes in the semiarid region of Brazil and local processing techniques as a driver of bioaccessibility.

Ethnobotanical studies report that human populations from the Brazilian Caatinga biome use tree legumes (Fabaceae) with medicinal and food purposes. Our study provides a systematic review of the available published information concerning the antioxidant potential of Hymenaea courbaril L. (jatobá), Libidibia ferrea (Mart. Ex Tul.) L.P.Queiroz (jucá), and Dioclea grandiflora Mart. Ex Benth. (mucunã). Furthermore, in this paper, we infer the possible effects of local processing techniques applied to these plants on their antioxidant potential. In order to achieve these goals, we reviewed 52 articles, including studies from ethnobiology (n = 17), chemistry (n = 32), and food studies testing antioxidant activity (n = 17), excluding 14 repetitions. We found that these legume species can inhibit the formation of free radicals and this potential action varies among different parts of the plant. Probably, the presence of phenolic compounds such as phenolic acids and flavonoids, which are not uniformly distributed in the plants, explain their antioxidant activity. Local processing techniques (i.e., roasting, milling) affect the bioaccessibility of antioxidant components of tree legumes, inducing both positive and negative effects. However, studies about the antioxidant potential did not consider local processing techniques in their analyses. Our study highlights that culture is a fundamental driver of nutritional and pharmacological outcomes related to edible resources since it determines which parts of the plant people consume and how they prepare them. Hence, ignoring cultural variables in the analysis of antioxidant activity will produce inaccurate or wrong scientific conclusions.

Taste and chemical composition as drives for utilitarian redundancy and equivalence: a case study in local medical systems in Northeastern Brazil.

BACKGROUND: We aimed to verify whether the taste and chemical composition influence the selection of plants in each medicinal category, whether within a socio-ecological system or between different socio-ecological systems. To this end, we use the theoretical bases of the Utilitarian Redundancy Model and the Utilitarian Equivalence Model. We studied the local medical systems of four rural communities in northeastern Brazil, used as models to test our assumptions. METHODS: The data on medicinal plants and local therapeutic function were obtained from semi-structured interviews associated with the free-listing method, allowing to generate indexes of similarity of therapeutic use between the plants cited in each region. During the interviews, each informer was also asked to report the tastes of the plants cited. Subsequently, we classified each plant in each region according to the most cited taste. The data about the chemical composition of each plant were obtained from a systematic review, using Web of Knowledge and Scopus databases. RESULTS: Pairs of plants with similar tastes are 1.46 times more likely to have the same therapeutic function within a local medical system (redundancy), but not between medical systems (equivalence). We also find that chemical compounds are not primarily responsible for utilitarian redundancy and equivalence. However, there was a tendency for alkaloids to be doubly present with greater expressiveness in pairs of equivalent plants. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that each social group can create its means of using the organoleptic characteristics as clues to select new species as medicinal. Furthermore, this study corroborates the main prediction of the Utilitarian Equivalence Model, that people in different environments choose plants with traits in common for the same functions.

Influence of Religiosity and Spirituality on the Adoption of Behaviors of Epidemiological Relevance in Emerging and Re-Emerging Diseases: The Case of Dengue Fever.

Emerging and re-emerging diseases are responsible for recurrently affecting the health of human populations. Although people are aware of these diseases, they do not seem to adopt prophylactic methods to prevent them. Here, we propose to investigate the influence of religiosity/spirituality (R/S) on the frequency of the adoption of prophylactic behaviors and the perception of risk of vulnerability to the disease. We used dengue, which is a seasonal arboviral disease in Brazil, as a model. To measure the dimensions of religiosity/spirituality, we used the Portuguese version of the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiosity/Spirituality questionnaire. All data were obtained through a structured questionnaire that was answered online by 204 volunteers living throughout Brazil. Our results indicate that R/S is predictive of the frequency of prophylactic behaviors (p = 0.0222, R2 = 0.025) and the perception of risk of vulnerability (p < 0.05, R2 = 0.07). We argue that the effect of R/S on health occurs through the promotion of salutogenic mechanisms promoted by socialization in religious environments. This can help understand social dynamics in epidemiological crises and mitigate the influence of these diseases.

Memory for medicinal plants remains in ancient and modern environments suggesting an evolved adaptedness.

Adaptive memory is the propensity of human memory to easily store and retrieve important information to deal with challenges related to the Pleistocene. Recent evidence shows that humans have had a multiregional evolution across the African continent, including the rainforests and deciduous forests; however, there is little evidence regarding the implications of these origins and the relevant and recurring challenges of these environments on survival processing advantage in memory. In this study, we conducted an experiment with volunteers to analyze whether adaptive memory operates in the retrieval of important information to solve challenges of using medicinal plants to treat diseases in the ancestral environments of the savanna, rainforests, and deciduous forests compared to the modern environments of desert, tundra, coniferous forest, and urban areas. We used simulated survival environments and asked volunteers (30 per simulated scenario) to imagine themselves sick in one of these environments, and needing to find medicinal plants to treat their disease. The volunteers rated the relevance of 32 words to solve this challenge, followed by a surprise memory test. Our results showed no ancestral priority in recalling relevant information, as both ancestral and modern environments showed a similar recall of relevant information. This suggests that the evolved cognitive apparatus allows human beings to survive and can create survival strategies to face challenges imposed in various environments. We believe that this is only possible if the human mind operates through a flexible cognitive mechanism. This flexibility can reflect, for example, the different environments that the first hominids inhabited and the different dangerous situations that they faced.

Cultural Evolution and Digital Media: Diffusion of Fake News About COVID-19 on Twitter.

Disinformation (fake news) is a major problem that affects modern populations, especially in an era when information can be spread from one corner of the world to another in just one click. The diffusion of misinformation becomes more problematic when it addresses issues related to health, as it can affect people at both the individual and population levels. Through the ideas proposed by cultural evolution theory, in this study, we seek to understand the dynamics of disseminating messages (cultural traits) with untrue content (maladaptive traits). For our investigation, we used the scenario caused by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as a model. The instability caused by the pandemic provides a good model for the study of adapted and maladaptive traits, as the information can directly affect individual and population fitness. Through data collected on the Twitter platform (259,176 tweets) and using machine learning techniques and web scraping, we built a predictive model to analyze the following questions: (1) Is false information more shared? (2) Is false information more adopted? (3) Do people with social prestige influence the dissemination of maladaptive traits of COVID-19? We observed that fake news features contained in messages with false information were shared and adopted as unblemished messages. We also observed that social prestige was not a determining factor for the diffusion of maladaptive traits. Even with the ability to allow connections between individuals participating in social media, some factors such as attachment to cultural traits and the formation of social bubbles can favor isolation and decrease connectivity between individuals. Consequently, in the scenario of isolation between groups and low connectivity between individuals, there is a reduction in cultural exchange between people, which interferes with the dynamics of the selection of cultural traits. Thus, maladaptive (harmful) traits are favored and maintained in the cultural system. We also argue that the local Brazilian cultural context can be a determining factor for maintaining maladaptive traits. We conclude that in an unstable (pandemic) scenario, the information transmitted on Twitter is not reliable in relation to the increase in fitness, which may occur because of the low cultural exchange promoted by the personalization of the social network and cultural context of the population. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42979-021-00836-w.

Safety assessment of Bauhinia cheilantha Bong. Steud leaves extract: acute, sub-acute toxicity, antioxidant, and antihemolytic evaluations.

Bauhinia cheilantha (Fabaceae), known popularly as pata-de-vaca and mororó has been largely recommended treating several diseases in folk medicine. However, information on safe doses and use is still scarce. The goal was to evaluate in-vitro antioxidant and antihemolytic and also acute and sub-acute toxicity effects of hydroalcoholic extract from B. cheilantha leaves (HaEBcl). The identification of the compounds in the HaEBcl was performed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with a diode array detector and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Antioxidant and hemolytic activity of HaEBcl was evaluated in vitro. To study acute toxicity, female mice received HaEBcl in a single dose of 300 and 2.000 mg/kg. Later, sub-acute toxicity was introduced in both female and male mice by oral gavage at 300, 1000, or 2000 mg/kg for 28 consecutive days. Hematological and biochemical profiles were created from the blood as well as from histological analysis of the liver. HaEBcl is rich in flavonoids (quercitrin and afzelin), has no hemolytic effects and moderate antioxidant effects in vitro. Acute toxicity evaluation showed that lethal dose (LD50) of HaEBcl was over 2000 mg/kg. Sub-acute toxicity testing elicited no clinical signs of toxicity, morbidity, or mortality. The hematological and biochemical parameters discounted any chance of hepatic or kidney toxicity. Furthermore, histopathological data did not reveal any disturbance in liver morphology in treated mice. Results indicate that HaEBcl has no hemolytic and moderate antioxidant effects in vitro. In addition, HaEBcl dosage levels up to 2000 mg/kg are nontoxic and can be considered safe for mammals.

What interferes with conducting free lists? A comparative ethnobotanical experiment.

BACKGROUND: The free list, also written "freelist", or "free recall", is an ethnographic method that characterizes the local knowledge of a population about a given cultural domain. However, there is still much to elucidate about the variables that can influence the number of items that participants cite using this technique. This study applied a casual-comparative experimental design to analyze whether 3 months' time, age, and external stimuli influence the similarity of plant free lists applied at different times. METHODS: Data was collected from 103 farmers from the rural community Alto dos Canutos, in the municipality of Picos, Piauí state, Brazil. Two free lists were conducted at two different times, with an interval of three months between them. Subsequently, the similarity between the first and second free lists of each participant was calculated using the Jaccard Similarity Index. The generalized linear model (GLM) with binomial errors and stepwise approach was used to analyze the effects of age and external stimuli on information collection when comparing free lists applied at different times. RESULTS: Participants' age influenced the information that the free lists collected, demonstrating that the older the participants, the lower the similarity among the free lists. Among the external stimuli analyzed, only the presence of third parties influenced the content of the free lists at the time of the interview. However, contrary to expectations, third-party presence positively influenced the similarity of the lists. CONCLUSION: The results show that the studied variables age and third-party presence can influence the capture of knowledge. These findings warrant future research into the influences' causes and their potential mitigation, e.g., by isolation or by breaking the medicinal plant domain into focused sub-domains and conducting simpler, successive free-lists, which can mitigate memory issues.

Rapid Ethnonutrition Assessment Method Is Useful to Prototype Dietary Assessments with a Focus on Local Biodiverse Food Plants.

Ethnonutrition is the study of diets in the context of food systems of different peoples and cultures. Its scope comprises native or local categories used to classify food, and also includes biodiverse food availability, local culinary techniques, seasonality, and cultural perceptions related to diet with nutritional implications. Here, we describe a method useful for gathering ethnonutrition data to design dietary interventions or assessments, the Rapid Ethnonutrition Assessment (REA). REA is a tool that offers food and nutrition research a broad biocultural view of diets, considering food system-level, by prototyping dietary assessments with high efficiency. This method permits us to prevent misinterpretations that lead to wrong conclusions in nutritional research.

Can medicinal use protect plant species from wood uses? Evidence from Northeastern Brazil.

Several ethnobotanical studies have attempted to understand the criteria for the differential use of plant resources. However, we need more effort to understand the interaction between local uses: how using a species for a given purpose may affect its use for another purpose. Thus, we hypothesize that high importance species in a more specialized category of use may have their use reduced for other categories with a more generalist nature. We have conducted the study in three rural communities in northeastern Brazil, set in seasonally dry tropical forest areas. We applied the free-list technique to identify woody species used for medicinal and/or wood purposes (fuelwood, construction and technology). Respondents rated the species according to their efficiency for wood purposes and their local availability. We performed a multiple regression to assess the effects of medicinal popularity, perceived availability, and perceived efficiency for wood uses over the species popularity for wood uses. Our results showed that medicinal use has a significant protective effect against wood uses. Perceived availability and efficiency were significant explanatory variables for wood use. Maintaining the medicinal importance of certain species can be a powerful tool in protecting their populations against more harmful uses.

Animal-based food systems are unsafe: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) fosters the debate on meat consumption.

OBJECTIVE: The current pandemic restarts a debate on permanently banning wildlife consumption in an effort to prevent further public health threats. In this commentary, we offer two ideas to enhance the discussion on foodborne zoonotic diseases in food systems. DESIGN: First, we focus on the probable consequences that the loss of access to wildlife could cause to the status of food and nutrition security of many people in developing countries that rely on bushmeat to subsist. Second, we argue that all animal-based food systems, especially the ones based on intensive husbandry, present food safety threats. CONCLUSION: To ban the access to bushmeat without a rational analysis of all human meat production and consumption in the global animal-based food system will not help us to prevent future outbreaks.