This workshop is an intensive training period designed for government or non-government employees who work in resource management and are already familiar with basic botanical field research methods of conservation biology.

The primary prupose of the workshop is to provide participants with an overview of the kinds of field methods that are used by modern ethnobotanists to address hypotheses in areas of conservation research and to do so using hands-on approaches. Participants are expected to learn methods through practice, collecting, analyzing, and interpretting real data.

Course Objectives: Each participant should be able to:

• Articulate scientific hypotheses about human interactions with plants that emerge from cultural situations, beliefs and practices.
• Discuss clear examples of ancient and modern transported landscapes and their implications for management of biological diversity.
• Define ethnobotany and describe current directions in the discipline.
• Understand what an ethical dilemma is and how to use standards of practice and scientific codes to prevent or resolve problems.
• Articulate a range of ethnographic techniques used by ethnobotanists for identification of research collaborators.
• Demonstrate good voucher specimen production methods and knowledge of how, when and why voucher specimens are produced during the research process.
• Produce a three-part informed consent form that is suitable for submission to an Internal Review Board.
• Demonstrate effective use of a variety of informant consensus research methods.
• Discuss patterns of folk taxonomic systems as they are found around the world.
• Discuss patterns of traditional botanical knowledge and how these are identified by ethnobotanists.
• Describe roles of gardens in maintaining cultural diversity and ethnic identity.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data about home gardens.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data about markets.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data about agroforestry plots.
• Describe a diversity of food traditions from around the world and how plants contribute to the richness of cultural food diversity.
• Describe how human senses relate to descriptions of plants and animals.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data about cultural artifacts.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data about human activities.
• Describe three major theories of understanding human concepts of health and disease.
• Define ethnopharmacology and describe current directions in the discipline.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data using a medicinal plant survey.
• Describe how human activities and perceptions vary across a range of temporal and spatial scales.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data about spatial distributions of plants, populations or regions.
• Demonstrate methods used to gather and analyze data about plant population density and diversity.
• Describe roles of ecosystem services for maintenance of life on earth.
• Describe global agreements about intellectual property rights and current conventions on biological diversity as well as issues such as bioprospecting and trade in plant genetic materials.

Course Structure:

The workshop is intensive and not for the faint of heart. Participants must be well rested before starting the course.

Participants will be expected to start each day quite early and to finish quite late. There will be little free time.

Each day of work will consist of three parts:

1. Morning discussion/presentation of topics by the instructors.
2. Afternoon data collection/ practical research training.
3. Evening data processing and analysis.

Anyone who is not able to do all three parts should not be consider being a participant in the workshop.