For millenia, Pacific Islanders have created and sustained rich and diverse biocultural relationships. Today these relationships continue to underpin many aspects of community resilience, wellbeing and biodiversity conservation, and are enabling communities to build alternative futures in the context of pressures ranging from globalization to climate change. However, biocultural research in the Pacific Islands remains under-represented and underfunded, and individuals carrying out this work often remain disconnected from each other.

This discussion session has two goals.

The first is to bring together students engaged in biocultural research in the Pacific Islands, with a special focus on those working in their home islands and communities. In the first half of this session, these students will share their work and discuss the opportunities and challenges they are facing. We are inviting graduate and undergraduate students from diverse disciplines, including botany, marine biology, linguistics and anthropology, among others.

The second goal is to bring together mentors and collaborators to discuss how we can build stronger networks, identify critical research attentive to community needs, and obtain more funding to better support students rooted in communities across the region engaging in biocultural research and practice. The second half of the session will therefore focus on identifying needs, and solutions for addressing them.

Overall, we aim to contribute to building a network of biocultural researchers and practitioners across islands, institutions, and disciplines that can help better engage and support our region’s students and communities.