Volume 3 Issue 4 of People and Nature is online now!

What’s on the cover?

The view from the heights of a Betsimisaraka village in the district of Vavateninaon the northeast coast of Madagascar. The picture shows traditional houses whose floors and walls are made of bamboo, and roofs with traveller’s tree palms. The farmers collect these two plants in their tsabo (agroforests). Around the houses, a wide diversity of fruit trees, including lychees, are grown in home gardens.

The cover image is taken from the Research Article by Juliette Mariel and colleagues Exploring farmers’ agrobiodiversity management practices and knowledge in clove agroforests of Madagascar.

You can learn more about this research in the authors’ plain language summary People-nature interactions through the lens of local ecological knowledge: an illustration on agroforests in Madagascar.

Oceans

Jamie Montgomery et al chart Ocean Health in the Northeast United States from 2005-2017 and present the Ocean Health Index (OHI) which is a framework for quantitatively assessing ocean health and present a guide to managers. To complement the paper Associate Editor Andrea Belgrano discusses the ocean’s contributions to human well-being.

Laura Kaikkonen and Ingrid van Putten consider peoples perceptions and understanding of the deep sea in their paper “We may not know much about the deep sea, but do we care about mining it?” and in the plan language summary explore how peoples underlying values and emotions shape their care for the deep sea more than their knowledge of it.

The Amazon

Imma Oliveras and colleagues discuss how Participatory Mapping Reveals Sociocultural Drivers of Forest Fires in Protected Areas of the Post-Conflict Colombian Amazon and on the blog explore further the process of Making Mind Maps in the Amazon. For even more reading check out the authors press release.

Staying in the Amazon Veronica Santafe Troncoso and colleagues investigate the concerns about the use of tilapia fish in Indigenous cuisine in the Amazonia of Ecuador.

British woodlands

Closer to home Gail Austen, and colleagues explore the shared public perspectives on biodiversity attributes and discovering how the public interact with, respond to, and talk about British woodlands.

All articles published in People and Nature are Open Access and have a plain language summary written by the authors!

If you think your research could feature in a future issue of People and Nature or you are interested in contributing to a future Special Feature, get in touch or submit now!