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The debate in the literature on the science–practice interface suggests a diversity of opinions on how to link science and practice to improve conservation. Understanding this diversity is key to addressing unequal power relations, avoiding the consideration of only dominant views, and identifying strategies to link science and practice. In turn, linking science and practice should promote conservation decisions that are socially robust and scientifically informed. To identify and describe the viewpoints of scientists and decision makers on how the science–practice interface should work in order to improve conservation decisions, we interviewed Brazilian scientists (ecologists and conservation scientists, n = 11) and decision makers (n = 11). We used Q methodology and asked participants to rank their agreement with 48 statements on how the science–practice interface should work in order to improve conservation decisions. We used principal component analysis to identify shared viewpoints. The predominant viewpoint, shared by scientists and decision makers, was characterized by valuing the integration of scientific and strategic knowledge to address environmental problems. The second viewpoint, held mostly by decision makers, was distinguished by assigning great importance to science in the decision-making process and calling for problem-relevant research. The third viewpoint, shared only by scientists, was characterized by an unwillingness to collaborate and a perception of scientists as producers of knowledge that may help decision makers. Most participants agreed organizations should promote collaboration and that actors and knowledge from both science and practice are relevant. Disagreements concerned specific roles assigned to actors, willingness to collaborate, and organizational and institutional arrangements considered effective to link science and practice. Our results suggest there is ample room for collaborations and that impediments lie mainly in existing organizations and formal institutional arrangements rather than in negative attitudes between scientists and decision makers. El debate en la literatura sobre la interrelación ciencia-práctica sugiere una diversidad de opiniones sobre cómo conectar a la ciencia con la práctica para mejorar la conservación. La comprensión de esta diversidad es clave para tratar con las relaciones desiguales de poder, evitar la considerar únicamente de los puntos de vista dominantes, e identificar las estrategias para vincular a la ciencia con la práctica. En cambio, la vinculación entre la ciencia y la práctica debería promover las decisiones de conservación que son socialmente fuertes y científicamente informadas. Entrevistamos a científicos (ecólogos y conservadores, n = 11) y tomadores de decisiones (n = 11) en Brasil para identificar y describir los puntos de vista de los científicos y de quienes toman las decisiones sobre cómo la interrelación ciencia-práctica debería trabajar con tal de mejorar las decisiones de conservación. Usamos la metodología Q y les pedimos a los participantes que clasificaran su acuerdo con 48 declaraciones sobre cómo la interrelación ciencia-práctica debería trabajar para mejorar las decisiones de conservación. Utilizamos un análisis de componentes principales para identificar los puntos de vista compartidos. El punto de vista predominante, compartido entre los científicos y quienes toman las decisiones, se caracterizó por el valor que le dio a la integración del conocimiento científico y el estratégico para tratar los problemas ambientales. El segundo punto de vista, compartido por la mayoría de quienes toman las decisiones, se distinguió por asignarle una gran importancia a la ciencia en cuanto al proceso de toma de decisiones y a la petición de investigación relevante para los problemas. El tercer punto de vista, compartido sólo entre los científicos, se caracterizó por el rechazo a colaborar y por la percepción de los científicos como productores de conocimiento que puede ayudar a quienes toman las decisiones. La mayoría de los participantes estuvo de acuerdo en que las organizaciones deberían promover la colaboración y en que los actores y el conocimiento científico y práctico son relevantes. Los desacuerdos estuvieron relacionados con los roles específicos asignados a los actores, el deseo de colaborar, y los arreglos institucionales y de organización considerados como efectivos para vincular a la ciencia con la práctica. Nuestros resultados sugieren que existe suficiente espacio para las colaboraciones y que los impedimentos se deben principalmente a las organizaciones existentes y a los arreglos institucionales formales en lugar de a las actitudes negativas entre los científicos y quienes toman las decisiones. 文献中针对学科交叉点的争论就如何结合科学和实践来提高保护成效提出了多种多样的观点。理解这 种多样性是处理不平等权力关系、避免只考虑主导观点，以及确定科学和实践相结合战略的关键。反过来，科 学和实践的结合应促成社会上坚稳可靠、科学上考虑周全的保护决策。为了确定和描述科学家和决策者关于 科学和实践如何交叉来改善保护决策的观点，我们采访了巴西的科学家（生态学家和保护科学家11人）和决策者 (11人）。我们利用Q方法学，要求参与者给出他们对4 8 条科学和实践如何交叉来改善保护决策的表述的赞同 度。我们用主成分分析找出了他们共同的观点。科学家和决策者都同意的最主要观点是要重视科学和战略知 识的整合来解决环境问题。第二个观点主要由决策者持有，是在决策过程中要重视科学，并呼吁进行更多与问 题相关的研究。只有科学家认同的第三个观点的特点是不愿意合作，并认为科学家创造了可以帮助决策者的知 识。大多数参与者都同意组织机构应该促进合作，行动者与来自科学和实践的知识均有重要关系。分歧则在于 实践者应担负的具体角色、合作的意愿和组织或机构如何安排才能有效结合科学和实践。我们的结果表明科学 家和决策者尚有很大的合作空间，目前的障碍主要在于现有组织和正式机构的协调安排，而不是二者之间的消 极态度。

Sustainable fishing is one of the most pressing challenges for mankind and requires insightful knowledge of the drivers that may foster or hinder predatory exploitation. It has been widely recognized that Indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of resources, such as fisheries, worldwide. Nevertheless such knowledge continues to be marginalized and unacknowledged by a range of academic scientists and policy makers. In the present paper, we tackle this issue by discussing laws regarding closed fishing seasons, which are part of the Brazilian environmental policies for protecting marine fauna, from the perspective of artisanal fishers’ knowledge. In Brazil, these laws are typically based on governmental decisions (i.e., by administrative organizations and researchers acting as consultants) without taking fishers’ knowledge into account. Through semi-structured interviews with traditional experts of fishing villages situated along the northeast coast of Brazil, we aimed to investigate their knowledge of fish reproductive periods and analyze how it is related to the closed seasons at work in their region. We found an exact agreement between fishers’ knowledge and closed season regulations on the reproductive period of the mangrove crab (Ucides cordatus), but a conflict regarding the reproductive period of two snook species and four species of shrimps. We highlight the potential of fishers’ knowledge contributions to environmental regulations and we also explore three challenges of incorporating epistemic diversity in environmental policy. We conclude by advocating for a reflexive transdisciplinarity that highlights the potential of Indigenous and local knowledge while critically reflecting on the methodological and political challenges of transdisciplinary practices.

Socio‐environmental changes are threatening Indigenous peoples and local communities (IP&LC), hampering conservation efforts, jeopardizing biocultural diversity and escalating environmental injustice. This situation fostered both collaborative research projects showing the potential of engaging with IP&LC for conserving biocultural diversity, and ideas in sustainability science as the relevance of accounting for plural human‐nature relationships and nature values in decision making. The success of these initiatives, however, depends on unveiling socio‐environmental conflicts as a first step to dialogue and cooperation. We developed a tool to describe viewpoints on human‐nature relationships that underpin socio‐environmental conflicts based on a multicultural conceptual framework and Q‐methodology. To investigate its usefulness to unveil conflicts within community‐based projects, we applied it to community members and researchers working collaboratively in an artisanal fishing community in Brazil. By purposefully choosing 23 participants who ordered 44 statements producing distributions later analysed for correlations, we described three viewpoints on human‐nature relationships and, from them, the main socio‐environmental conflicts within the community. Two viewpoints associated with community members revealed contrasting standpoints about nature resulting from complex transformations—from resource‐dependent to tourism‐dependent—in the community. While some people whose occupations depend on outsiders wish to exploit and earn money with nature, others who depend exclusively on fishing fear that nature is under threat. These viewpoints allowed characterizing divergences that can limit collective organization within the community as well as shared desires for the future. One viewpoint was associated with researchers, highlighting differences between theirs and community members' conceptions. Although framed to a specific situation, given its replicable development and amplitude of its conceptual basis, the tool can be adapted to different contexts. By underscoring the diversity within local communities, our tool helps leaving behind idealized notions about them. It also facilitates reflexivity among researchers on how their viewpoints can impact their relationship with communities. As a way of collectively reflecting about local perspectives on human‐nature relationships, the tool facilitates collaboration and finding ways forward. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Resumo Mudanças socioambientais ameaçam povos indígenas e comunidades locais (PI&CL), prejudicando esforços de conservação, comprometendo a diversidade biocultural e aumentando a injustiça ambiental. Esta situação estimulou tanto projetos de pesquisa colaborativa, que vêm mostrando o potencial do engajamento com PI&CL para conservação da diversidade biocultural, como ideias em ciência da sustentabilidade a respeito da relevância de se considerar relações humano‐natureza e valores da natureza plurais na tomada de decisão. O sucesso destas iniciativas, entretanto, depende de revelarmos os conflitos socioambientais como primeiro passo para o diálogo e cooperação. Desenvolvemos uma ferramenta para descrever pontos de vista sobre as relações humano‐natureza das quais emergem conflitos socioambientais baseada em um esquema conceitual multicultural e na Metodologia‐Q. Para investigar sua utilidade em revelar conflitos em projetos de base comunitária, aplicamos a ferramenta em membros da comunidade e pesquisadores que trabalham colaborativamente em uma comunidade de pesca artesanal no Brasil. Selecionamos propositalmente 23 participantes, que ordenaram 44 afirmações, produzindo ordenações posteriormente analisadas por correlação. Identificamos três pontos de vista sobre as relações humano‐natureza e, a partir delas, os principais conflitos socioambientais na comunidade. Dois pontos de vista associados a membros da comunidade revelaram perspectivas contrastantes decorrentes de transformações complexas—de dependência da pesca para dependência do turismo—na comunidade. Algumas pessoas, cujas ocupações dependem do turismo, desejam explorar e lucrar com a natureza, enquanto outras, que dependem exclusivamente da pesca, temem que a natureza esteja ameaçada. Essas divergências podem limitar a organização coletiva, mas também encontramos pontos que revelam desejos comuns para o futuro. Um ponto de vista foi principalmente associado aos pesquisadores, destacando diferenças entre suas concepções e as da comunidade. Embora desenvolvida para uma situação específica, dado seu desenvolvimento replicável e a amplitude de sua base conceitual, a ferramenta pode ser adaptada a outros contextos. Ao enfatizar a diversidade em comunidades locais, a ferramenta ajuda a abandonar noções idealizadas sobre elas. Também facilita a reflexão dos pesquisadores sobre como suas visões impactam as relações com as comunidades. Como um modo de coletivamente refletir sobre as perspectivas locais sobre a natureza, a ferramenta facilita a colaboração e a identificação de possíveis caminhos para o futuro de comunidades locais. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

In this paper we present the development and validation a comprehensive questionnaire to assess college students' knowledge about modern genetics and genomics, their belief in genetic determinism, and their attitudes towards applications of modern genetics and genomic-based technologies. Written in everyday language with minimal jargon, the Public Understanding and Attitudes towards Genetics and Genomics (PUGGS) questionnaire is intended for use in research on science education and public understanding of science, as a means to investigate relationships between knowledge, determinism and attitudes about modern genetics, which are to date little understood. We developed a set of core ideas and initial items from reviewing the scientific literature on genetics and previous studies on public and student knowledge and attitudes about genetics. Seventeen international experts from different fields (e.g., genetics, education, philosophy of science) reviewed the initial items and their feedback was used to revise the questionnaire. We validated the questionnaire in two pilot tests with samples of university freshmen students. The final questionnaire contains 45 items, including both multiple choice and Likert scale response formats. Cronbach alpha showed good reliability for each section of the questionnaire. In conclusion, the PUGGS questionnaire is a reliable tool for investigating public understanding and attitudes towards modern genetics and genomic-based technologies.

It has been proposed that ecological theory develops in a pragmatic way. This implies that ecologists are free to decide what, from the knowledge available to them, they will use to build models and learn about phenomena. Because in fields that develop pragmatically knowledge generation is based on the decisions of individuals and not on a set of predefined axioms, the best way to produce theoretical synthesis in such fields is to assess what individuals are using to support scientific studies. Here, we present an approach for producing theoretical syntheses based on the propositions most frequently used to learn about a defined phenomenon. The approach consists of (i) defining a phenomenon of interest; (ii) defining a collective of scientists studying the phenomenon; (iii) surveying the scientific studies about the phenomenon published by this collective; (iv) identifying the most referred publications used in these studies; (v) identifying how the studies use the most referred publications to give support to their studies and learn about the phenomena; (vi) and from this, identifying general propositions on how the phenomenon is approached, viewed and described by the collective. We implemented the approach in a case study on the phenomenon of ecological succession, defining the collective as the scientists currently studying succession. We identified three propositions that synthesize the views of the defined collective about succession. The theoretical synthesis revealed that there is no clear division between “classical’’ and “contemporary’’ succession models, and that neutral models are being used to explain successional patterns alongside models based on niche assumptions. By implementing the pragmatic approach in a case study, we show that it can be successfully used to produce syntheses based on the actual activity of the scientific community studying the phenomenon. The connection between the resulting synthesis and research activity can be traced back through the methodological steps of the approach. This result can be used to understand how knowledge is being used in a field of study and can guide better informed decisions for future studies.

Functional language is ubiquitous in ecology, mainly in the researches about biodiversity and ecosystem function. However, it has not been adequately investigated by ecologists or philosophers of ecology. In the contemporary philosophy of ecology we can recognize a kind of implicit consensus about this issue: while the etiological approaches cannot offer a good concept of function in ecology, Cummins’ systemic approach can. Here we propose to go beyond this implicit consensus, because we think these approaches are not adequate for ecology. We argue that a sound epistemological framework to function in ecology is to be found in organizational approaches. In this line, we define function in ecology as a precise effect of a given constraint on the ecosystem flow of matter and energy performed by a given item of biodiversity, within a closure of constraints. We elaborate on this definition by developing a case study of a bromeliad ecosystem.

This paper proposes a new method to identify communities in generally weighted complex networks and apply it to phylogenetic analysis. In this case, weights correspond to the similarity indexes among protein sequences, which can be used for network construction so that the network structure can be analyzed to recover phylogenetically useful information from its properties. The analyses discussed here are mainly based on the modular character of protein similarity networks, explored through the Newman-Girvan algorithm, with the help of the neighborhood matrix . The most relevant networks are found when the network topology changes abruptly revealing distinct modules related to the sets of organisms to which the proteins belong. Sound biological information can be retrieved by the computational routines used in the network approach, without using biological assumptions other than those incorporated by BLAST. Usually, all the main bacterial phyla and, in some cases, also some bacterial classes corresponded totally (100%) or to a great extent (>70%) to the modules. We checked for internal consistency in the obtained results, and we scored close to 84% of matches for community pertinence when comparisons between the results were performed. To illustrate how to use the network-based method, we employed data for enzymes involved in the chitin metabolic pathway that are present in more than 100 organisms from an original data set containing 1,695 organisms, downloaded from GenBank on May 19, 2007. A preliminary comparison between the outcomes of the network-based method and the results of methods based on Bayesian, distance, likelihood, and parsimony criteria suggests that the former is as reliable as these commonly used methods. We conclude that the network-based method can be used as a powerful tool for retrieving modularity information from weighted networks, which is useful for phylogenetic analysis.

Many problems we face today, including sustainability issues, are complex and encompass intertwined systems. As such, they are difficult to understand and define due to the pluralism of values within society, which also makes it hard to reach agreement on these issues. Technocratic solutions then may be perceived as improper by stakeholders, detaching citizens from urgent issues. Inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to science have recently been strongly advocated as activities that can bring science closer to society to co-produce knowledge suited to deal with such complex problems. Here, we present a heuristic model on how scholars working in discipline-oriented universities can either reinforce disciplinarity or foster transition to inter- and transdisciplinarity. We then describe strategies we implemented to promote this transition. Our model represents interactions scholars establish to perform academic activities and factors influencing how they develop such activities. According to the model, scholars’ interactions overcome disciplinarity when they are diversified and bidirectional, requiring that they work beyond the mainstream scientific practices, crossing the boundaries of traditional training, and using their expertise to influence academic policy and culture. Our strategies to foster inter- and transdisciplinarity encompassed learning-by-doing and influencing academic policies and culture by engaging in policy processes. The main challenges were associated with advancing our academic training while simultaneously navigating the discipline-oriented system of scholar evaluation. We hope our model and initiatives stimulate other scholars to confront discipline-oriented policies and culture, helping to close the gap between academic rigor and social relevance, and to integrate sciences contributing to sustainability, practice, and policy.

Background Traditional fishing communities are strongholds of ethnobiological knowledge but establishing to what degree they harbor cultural consensus about different aspects of this knowledge has been a challenge in many ethnobiological studies. Methods We conducted an ethnobiological study in an artisanal fishing community in northeast Brazil, where we interviewed 91 community members (49 men and 42 women) with different type of activities (fishers and non-fishers), in order to obtain free lists and salience indices of the fish they know. To establish whether there is cultural consensus in their traditional knowledge on fish, we engaged a smaller subset of 45 participants in triad tasks where they chose the most different fish out of 30 triads. We used the similarity matrices generated from the task results to detect if there is cultural consensus in the way fish were classified by them. Results The findings show how large is the community’s knowledge of fish, with 197 ethnospecies registered, of which 33 species were detected as salient or important to the community. In general, men cited more fish than women. We also found that there was no cultural consensus in the ways fish were classified. Conclusions Both free-listing and triad task methods revealed little cultural consensus in the way knowledge is structured and how fish were classified by community members. Our results suggest that it is prudent not to make assumptions that a given local community has a single cultural consensus model in classifying the organisms in their environment.

A recent idea of “ecosystem health” was introduced in the 1970s and 1980s to draws attention to the fact that ecosystems can become ill because of a reduction of properties such as primary productivity, functions and diversity of interactions among system components. Starting from the 1990s, this idea has been deeply criticized by authors who argued that, insofar as ecosystems show many differences with respect to organismic features, these two kinds of systems cannot share a typical organismic property such as health. In recent years, an organisational approach in philosophy of biology and ecology argued that both organisms and ecosystems may share a fundamental characteristic despite their differences, namely, organisational closure. Based on this kind of closure, scholars have also discussed health and malfunctional states in organisms. In this paper, we examine the possibility of expanding such an organisational approach to health and malfunctions to the ecological domain. Firstly, we will see that a malfunction is related to a lower effectiveness in the functional behaviour of some biotic components with respect to other systemic components. We will then show how some introduced species do not satisfactorily interact in an organisational closure with other ecosystem components, thus posing a threat to the self-maintenance of the ecosystem in which they are found. Accordingly, we will argue that an ecosystem can be said to be healthy when it is a vital environment organisationally grounded on its intrinsic capacity to ensure, under favourable conditions, appropriate functional behaviours for ecosystem components and ecosystem self-maintenance.