Alex is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work draws on anthropology, ethnobotany, geography and ecology to examine the myriad forms of interdependence between human communities and the natural world. Exploring in particular the spiritual and multi-species dimensions of biocultural diversity, he has degrees in Religious Studies and Ethnobotany and a professional background in field botany, ornithology and environmental education. While his interests are global, much of his experience is with biocultural communities from South and Southeast Asia, having worked in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Nepal. As a doctoral student with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), he is currently based in French Guiana while conducting research on plant circulation, relationality and resilience in the global Hmong diaspora. Alex believes that sound research can build the relationships and lay the groundwork necessary to create collaborative community empowerment projects that improve the welfare of local communities while also protecting the ecological systems and other lives that help to constitute this earth, our hearth and home.

Her interests lie within engaging planning for an inclusive and gentle use of our shared land and resources, and that ensures a fair share of access for all species. She believes in participatory praxes based on local values. Most recently, she has researched the effects of long and short value chains of products stemming from agro-silvo-pastoral land stewardship, specialising my doctoral research on the montado and dehesa cork oak woodlands of the Iberian Peninsula. Zooming in from an overall landscape planning perspective, she has engaged with all sorts of horticulture and agriculture and agroforestry systems both hands on and through research. Her background is as a landscape architect and gardener, and she specialised her BSc in cross-border nature protection legislation between Denmark and Germany. She finished her MSc in ethnobotany focusing on temporal dynamics in homegardens in the Eastern part of Tirol.
Prior to going to university, she had many years experience from working at an opera house in her home town Copenhagen. She used to play the trombone, loves hikes and engaging with the seasons, and gathering and cooking with fresh herbs from her surroundings. Currently, she based in a small town in the middle of Germany where she lives with her partner and her young son.

Victoria is a trained ecologist, artist, and educator. She holds a MSc in Nature Management and a certificate in Natural History Illustration from Newcastle University. Victoria is the founder of Provence Nature Journal Club and is currently the mapping artist of Resylien, a regenerative farming consultancy. Her understanding of the lives of plants is based on her international fieldwork and intimate work with the Herbaria of the University of Copenhagen. She has worked in Norway, Denmark, Panama, and Cambodia on gender issues, plant medicine, and the effects of climate and land-use change on a local and global scale. Victoria’s naturalist sketchbooks are vessels of exploration and personal learning, indispensable in seeking to understand, and thus support, the essence and resilience of the natural world. She wishes to share this method of learning with others. She believes that intimate and educational experiences in nature need to become more accessible.

For more than 10 years Francesca has studied and researched contemporary and historical land-based and spiritual practices both as an ethnobotanist and as a practitioner training through observation, intuitive and creative methods and apprenticing with herbalists and other knowledge holders, including medicine people, herders and farmers. She trained as an ethnobotanist at the Centre for Biocultural Diversity, University of Kent, and she is apprenticing as a medical herbalist at the Plant Medicine School, Ireland. Besides ethnobotany, her academic background is in Religious Studies (University of Edinburgh – MA(Hons) and Indigenous Studies (Arctic University of Tromsø – MPhil). Her approach is rooted in participatory methods and storytelling and based on the understanding of our land and home as sacred. She has researched plant knowledge, spiritual and land-based practices with local communities in Nepal, India, Norway, Madagascar, Italy, Bulgaria and the UK.

Rajindra K Puri (Raj) is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for Biocultural Diversity, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. He was trained as an anthropologist and ethnobiologist at Middlebury College and the University of Hawai’i, and gained initial research and policy experience as a Degree Fellow in the Environment and Policy Institute of the East West Center in Hawai’i, and as a postdoc at CIFOR in Indonesia. For more than 30 years he has been conducting interdisciplinary research on local knowledge systems, the dynamics of human-environment relations, and developing biocultural approaches to conservation social science and climate adaptation science, in Southeast and South Asia, and Europe. Most of his research has been conducted with local researchers. He has extensive experience in multidisciplinary teams, co-creating research design, and teaching anthropology to natural scientists. His recent research explores human responses to complex social and environmental changes, such as invasive species in southern India, rural landscapes in Europe, and the disappearance of wild pigs in Borneo.

Nerea Turreira-García, a native of the Basque Country, has dedicated her research to unraveling the complexities of socio-ecological systems and the invaluable knowledge held by indigenous and rural communities worldwide. Her academic curiosity has led her to study wild edible plant knowledge among Mayan communities in Guatemala, participatory forest monitoring in Southeast Asia, the adaptation of traditional processing practices among shea collectors in West Africa, and the adoption of agroforestry practices among smallholder coffee producers in Central America, Uganda, and Vietnam. Nerea continues her work on sustainable rural development and is dedicated to bridging the gap between local knowledge and citizen science, advocating for grassroots initiatives to adapt to global changes.