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This paper provides empirical and experimental assessments of thematic knowledge discourses based on two case studies in the US Virgin Islands and Florida. We utilize a latent semantic indexing analysis over natural language corpus to classify and categorize knowledge categories. We computed TF*IDF scores and associated co-occurrence Jaccard similarity scores to construct semantic knowledge networks. Using network analysis, we computed structural metrics over four composite groups: neighbor-based, centrality, equivalence and position. The analysis show that structural network characteristics of environmental knowledge can exponentially predict associations between knowledge categories. We show that connectivity play a critical role on acquisition, representation, and diffusion patterns of knowledge within local communities. We provide evidence of a global prevalence of a shared knowledge core. We show that core social-ecological attributes of knowledge follow scale-free, power law distributions and stable, equilibrium network structures. We identify two distinct models of bidirectional translation: a bottom-up and a top-down.