United States
£ GBP
Research in recent years has increasingly shifted away from purely academic research and into applied aspects of the discipline, including climate change research, conservation, and sustainable development. It has by now widely been recognized that "traditional" knowledge is always in flux and adapting to a quickly changing environment. Trends of globalization, especially the globalization of plant markets, have greatly influenced how plant resources are managed nowadays. While ethnobotanical studies are now available from many regions of the world, no comprehensive encyclopedic series focusing on the world's mountain regions is available in the market. Scholars in plant sciences worldwide will be interested in this website and its dynamic content.
The field (and thus the market) of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology has grown considerably in recent years. Student interest is on the rise, attendance at professional conferences has grown steadily, and the number of professionals calling themselves ethnobotanists has increased significantly (the various societies (Society for Economic Botany, International Society of Ethnopharmacology, Society of Ethnobiology, International Society for Ethnobiology, and many regional and national societies in the field currently have thousands of members). Growth has been most robust in BRIC countries.
The objective of this new reference work on the ethnobotany of mountain regions is to take advantage of the increasing international interest and scholarship in the field of mountain research. The publisher anticipates including the best and latest research on a full range of descriptive, methodological, theoretical, and applied research on the most important plants for each region. Each contribution will be scientifically rigorous and contribute to the overall field of study.
Alejandro Casas is a Mexican researcher, with bachelor's and master's degrees in Biological Sciences from the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a doctoral degree in Plant Sciences from the University of Reading, UK. Since 1997 he is a full-time Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas y Sustentabilidad (Institute of Research on Ecosystems and Sustainability), at UNAM, campus Morelia, in the state of Michoacan. He is a member of the National System of Researchers, with the highest level (level 3). Dr Casas has conducted research in the following fields: (1) ecology, culture, and evolution of biodiversity under processes of domestication, (2) management of ecosystems and landscape domestication, (3) ecology for the sustainable management of biotic resources and ecosystems, (4) in situ management of genetic resources, and (5) ethnoecology and biocultural heritage. His research group has made theoretical contributions to the evolutionary mechanisms operating on current processes of domestication, as well as on the origins of food production, agriculture, and domestication in the Neotropics. Also, his group has made contributions to understanding biocultural processes generating agrobiodiversity and the bases for their conservation, models of sustainable use of non-timber forest products and agroforestry systems. His work has been mainly conducted in regions of Mexico and Peru and has collaborated in studies in Brazil. The results of his research have been published in nearly 200 peer-reviewed articles, more than 100 book chapters, and 13 books that have been authored or edited.
Dr Casas is a section editor of the journals Botanical Sciences, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution and Ethnobotany Research and Applications and a member of the Mexican, Latin American, and international societies of botany, ecology, and ethnobiology. He was a promoter of the Biosphere Reserve Tehuacan-Cuicatlan, Director of the Centro de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas (CIEco), and promoter of the creation of the Instituto de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas y Sustentabilidad (IIES) and the Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores (ENES), UNAM-Morelia.
Jose Blancas is a Mexican researcher, with bachelor's and master's degrees in biological sciences from the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a doctoral degree from the Centro de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas (Ecosystem Research Center, UNAM). Since 2015 he is a full-time Researcher at the Centro de Investigacion en Biodiversidad y Conservacion (Biodiversity and Conservation Research Center), at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, in the city of Cuernavaca. He is a member of the National System of Researchers (level 2). Dr. Blancas has conducted research in the following fields: (1) ethnobotany, (2) management strategies of wild plant resources by traditional human communities, (3) ecological consequences of plant management, and (4) non-timber forest products. He has taught courses on the epistemology of ethnobiology, as well as on quantitative methods used in ethnobiological studies. He has published 35 articles, four books, and 20 book chapters and currently is the editor-in-chief of Etnobiologia, the journal of the Mexican Ethnobiological Association A.C. (AEM), and section editor of Botanical Sciences.
