Across the Americas, the increasing scope and severity of accelerated biodiversity loss, environmental conflicts, and climate change are threatening critical ecosystem services and human well-being. To more effectively address and resolve these challenges, it is necessary to foster equitable and effective collaboration and respectful knowledge sharing among scientists from multiple disciplines, stakeholders, policymakers, local knowledge keepers, and members of the general public. Long-term innovative and sustainable changes emerge from integrating diverse world views and knowledge systems that increase local adaptive capacity to climate change and facilitate consensus-making and broader co-ownership of social-ecological solutions.

 Our project assembles a transdisciplinary, international research team currently involved in place-based natural resource conservation and global change-related projects. We seek to generate integrated sustainable knowledge by nurturing a horizontal and more equitable research collaboration process –decentering academia– that empowers a broad range of diverse stakeholders and knowledge users to co-create place-based solution-oriented research. 

Such collaborative knowledge production aims to create real-world applicability solutions and reduce societal gaps, including power asymmetries, divergent interests, and values, present in ongoing ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation governance strategies.