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Les systèmes semenciers paysans jouent un rôle crucial dans l’accès aux semences en Afrique de l’Ouest. Cependant, les Etats et les bailleurs de développement visent à structurer ces systèmes semenciers, notamment via l’expansion des coopératives semencières et la commercialisation de semences certifiées de variétés homologuées. Néanmoins, le décalage de ces cadres normatifs avec la réalité et les spécificités de l’agriculture familiale suscite des inquiétudes. Via une description fine et quantifiée des pratiques de gestion de la diversité cultivée par les ménages de quatre villages du bassin arachidier sénégalais, notre étude met en évidence une coexistence entre variétés plus ou moins anciennes, issues de la sélection paysanne ou de la recherche, et diffusées selon les réseaux d’échanges locaux, étatiques, ou encore privés, sans que l’un ne supplante l’autre. Cette coexistence s’observe à la fois à l’échelle des ménages et des villages, selon les spécificités inhérentes à chaque exploitation et terroir agricole et l’influence des projets de développement territorialisés. L’articulation et la porosité entre ces différents systèmes d’approvisionnement à différentes échelles montrent ainsi la nécessité de penser au cas par cas l’accompagnement de ces évolutions, en fonction de chaque contexte local. Face à cette complexité, les paysans, dans leur diversité, sont finalement les mieux placés pour orienter leurs choix. Une évolution des cadres normatifs des politiques semencières apparait donc nécessaire pour mieux les accompagner en ce sens. Farmer seed systems play a crucial role in access to seeds in West Africa. However, governments and development organizations aim to structure these seed systems, notably through the expansion of seed cooperatives and the commercialization of certified seeds of approved varieties. Nevertheless, the discrepancy of these normative frameworks with the reality and specificities of family farming raises concerns. Through a detailed and quantified description of the management practices of cultivated diversity by households in four villages in the Senegalese groundnut basin, our study highlights the coexistence of varieties more or less ancient, derived from farmer selection or research, and disseminated through local, state, or private exchange networks, without one supplanting the other. This coexistence can be observed at both the household and village levels, depending on the specificities inherent to each farm and agricultural terroir and the influence of territorialized development projects. The articulation and porosity between these different systems of supply at different scales show the need to consider the support of these changes on a case-by-case basis, according to each local context. Faced with this complexity, farmers, in their diversity, are ultimately in the best position to guide their choices. An evolution of the normative frameworks of seed policies appears necessary to better accompany them in this sense.

Establishing linkage among data of diverse domains (e.g. biological, environmental, socio-economical, and geographical) is critical to address complex multidimensional issues such as food security or sustainable agriculture. The complexity of this challenge increases with the level of heterogeneity of the data but also with the social context of production of datasets, a dimension usually less considered. Building on the experience of a transdisciplinary project on the diversity of crop diversity management systems in West Africa (CoEx), this chapter reflects on the importance to better account for agency for more meaningful, responsible and efficient plant data linkage. The chapter addresses sequentially the cognitive and political challenges related to data work and the way they could be addressed simultaneously within the same social unit. To do this, we rely on the concept of community of practice (CoP) which gained enormous popularity in relation to data and knowledge management. More than simply a social mechanism for community knowledge management, we show in this contribution that CoP needs to be approached as a social experiment and a terrain of collective situated learning in order to address each challenge and their linkages with respect to data work.

International audience; Understanding how biocultural landscapes, as a result of human-nature interactions, have emerged and will evolve seem to us a fundamental prerequisite to better anticipate and understand the new ecological dynamics at work in Madagascar. This may help to better implement biodiversity conservation measures within and outside protected areas. In this contribution, we present several biocultural landscapes on the island, providing examples in contrasting ecological situations. These range from relatively old agricultural and agroforestry landscapes that continue to evolve today, which in turn make up relatively densely wooded landscapes without natural forests in an agroforestry landscape entirely formed by farmers. These cultivated landscapes, rich in cash crops, provide significant income to farmers, which makes such regions some of the most economically productive on the island. In contrast, the dry spiny thicket in the extreme south, provides an example with rather different dynamics. Here, the combination of the local cultural groups relying on agricultural activities (hatsaky or swidden agriculture) and hunting-gathering live in a rather ecologically extreme ecosystem. In the following sections, we present several biocultural landscapes and place each in its historical, biogeographical, human, and economic context.

This protocol has been designed to collect local perceptions of climate change impacts on climatic (e.g. rainfall patterns change), physical (e.g., shrinking glaciers), biological (e.g., phenological changes), and socioeconomic systems (e.g., crop failure due to rainfall patterns change), but also adaptations to those impacts, local agricultural calendars and local narratives to allow the reconstruction of historical and relevant events using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

Projections based on agroclimatic models envision a dramatic decrease in the agricultural production at the global scale. However, these models focus on the major crops, and the diversity of crop species and landraces responses to climate change are poorly documented. This protocol has been designed to collect local level data on changes in crop related to climate, and resulting adaptations of farming communities.

The transition from shifting cultivation to perennial crop cultivation is observed in many regions across the tropics, to meet environmental and socio-economic challenges. In some areas, small-scale farmers have engaged in crop diversification through agroforestry, a practice that enables production for self-consumption and income, while coping with environmental constraints and heterogeneity. This is the case in a zone of Vavatenina commune of Madagascar, where the Betsimisaraka small-scale farmers have abandoned the traditional shifting rice cultivation on hills (tanety) in favor of agroforestry, mainly based on clove tree cultivation. These different tanety land uses shape complex agricultural landscapes that seems to result from various types of agroforests. Despite the major interest Vavatenina original landscapes may have from a sustainability perspective, its composition and spatial structure have not been studied so far. However, the high heterogeneity of these landscapes, at different scales (the plot, the village territory, the commune), raises methodological challenges. Similarly, scale related environmental factors, such as topography, slope and proximity to the road, appear to play on this heterogeneity, and thus required to be identified and their effect assessed. Our study applied an original method to meet this challenge by combining a landscape spatial analysis with a participatory mapping of agroforests. First, we described the composition and spatial organization of agroforestry at two scales, from that of agroforests in the landscape to that of species within agroforestry plots. Second, we analyzed the effects of topography and isolation level on the landscape and agroforests heterogeneity. We used a remote sensing method to quantify the proportion of the different tanety land uses, and analyze how agroforestry especially fits into the landscape and according to which environmental determinants. Then, we applied a participatory mapping method to study the spatial organization of species in 17 agroforests in a village of the study area. This method gave data on the species richness and the species associations in micro-zones related to topography. The results of the remote sensing analysis highlighted 10 different classes of tanety land uses, including more or less dense diversified agroforests, cloves tree and wood tree plantations. The results also indicated that the type of agroforests, the proportion of space they cover, and their insertion in the landscape differ very strongly between the localities of the study area. It seems that, while some areas have engaged massively in diversified and complex agroforestry, this is not the case in other nearby areas, where other less sustainable land uses seem to be favored (e.g. monoculture). The analysis of participatory maps showed that farmers managed between 8 and 22 species in their agroforests, and that they associated and spatially distributed these species according to topography. The combined results obtained with both methods contribute to better understand the heterogeneity of landscape and agroforests and its determinants. This approach would be of interest for supporting agroforestry transitions in other areas where farmers already engaged in such practices, to make a diagnostic of existing agroforestry and identify where and how support could be brought in priority.

This protocol has been designed to collect local perceptions of climate change impacts on climatic (e.g. rainfall patterns change), physical (e.g., shrinking glaciers), biological (e.g., phenological changes), and socioeconomic systems (e.g., crop failure due to rainfall patterns change), but also adaptations to those impacts, local agricultural calendars and local narratives to allow the reconstruction of historical and relevant events using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

The action of biological, environmental and social factors on crop evolutionary processes call for an interdisciplinary approach that combine biological and social sciences to get a comprehensive interpretation of crop diversity patterns. At different scales and for different species, several studies have shown that the organization of neutral crop genetic diversity may be associated to farmers' social organization. However, the observed patterns may result from very diverse sociocultural and biological processes, often historically linked, imposing a case-by-case interpretation. Here we compare studies conducted on sorghum in a contact zone of several sociocultural groups in Mount Kenya with a larger scale studies on pearl millet and Bambara groundnut in the Lake Chad Basin. The organization of crop genetic diversity is linked to farmers' social organization in the case of sorghum on Mount Kenya and of pearl millet at the west side of Lake Tchad, but not in the case of Bambara groundnut. The genetic diversity of crops was also structured by varieties attributes (phenological cycle duration, uses, and status - introduced or local). The uneven distribution of crop genetic clusters among sociocultural groups shows that population genetics methods can be used as innovative approaches by social scientists to interpret historical, sociocultural, and economic processes that may have influenced the organization of the genetic diversity of these crops. Crop diversity dynamics can be better understood by taking precisely into account current farmer's knowledge and practices about seed circulation, selection, and varieties choices, documented with an historical background. A better representation of how social and biological factors have interacted, over time and across different environments, to shape the crop diversity and to preserve its adaptability should help to advocate for a legal and political recognition of farmers' knowledge and practices in dynamic management of crop diversity.

Perú es un centro de origen de muchas especies de granos como Chenopodium quinoa Willd., Chenopodium palliducaule Aellen y Amaranthus caudatus L. Casi todas las especies nativas importantes del Perú son cultivadas en las tierras altas en agroecosistemas tradicionales por pequeños agricultores. El objetivo de nuestro estudio ha sido comprender la relación entre conservación y uso de la biodiversidad estudiando las prácticas de gestión de la agrobiodiversidad. Esto fue aplicado a siete de las principales especies de parientes silvestres de quínoa cultivada en la región de Puno, en Perú. Se llevó a cabo un estudio etnobotánico con miembros de seis comunidades agrícolas. La población estudiada se diferenciaba por etnias, género y edad. El método etnográfico nos han permitido considerar mejor la relación entre las sociedades andinas y su entorno, movilizando la cosmovisión andina para comprender e integrar las prácticas de manejo agrícola en la relación entre lo cultivado y lo silvestre. Las entrevistas etnobotánicas muestran, por un lado, la capacidad de los entrevistados para reconocer las diferentes especies y, por otro, los diferentes usos que estas personas conocen o practican. Los resultados obtenidos muestran cómo estas especies de parientes silvestres de quínoa son mantenidas por los agricultores debido a su importancia alimentaria, medicinal y religiosa. La diversificación genética de los cultivos es el resultado de estrategias y acciones de los pequeños agricultores destinadas a desarrollar variedades locales adaptables a una amplia gama de condiciones climáticas, ecológicas, agronómicas y sociales. El mantenimiento de este proceso permanente de diversificación genética impulsada por los agricultores y de adaptación a los cambios globales está directamente relacionado con estrategias específicas aplicadas a la gestión en las explotaciones de las variedades locales de quínoa y a la conservación in situ de ellas. Hacemos hincapié en la importancia del aprendizaje conjunto continuo con los actores locales para diseñar nuevas reglas para el manejo sostenible de agroecosistemas complejos y asegurar la producción agrícola para el futuro, teniendo más en cuenta las diversas dimensiones de la agrobiodiversidad.

International audience

The multi-dimensional diversification of agroecosystems, from the plot to the landscape scale, is known to be a key factor of social-ecological systems resilience. Agroforestry research especially brought considerable insights on this issue by documenting the socio-economic, agronomic and environmental outcomes of this type of practices. However, the drivers of agroforestry practices' heterogeneity and its spatial patterns remain poorly understood. This requires a diachronic perspective as the observed agroforestry systems often result from the gradual implantation of tree in pre-existing plantations, fallows, forests or pastures. This study addresses this issue through an original diachronic approach at the landscape scale, which contrasts from more usual static approaches focusing on cropping systems. We characterized the drivers of the observed heterogeneity of agroforestry practices and its spatial patterns in the landscape of a village located in the Analanjirofo region on eastern coast of Madagascar. In this locality, small farmers cultivated for 50 years varied perennial crops (clove, litchi and fruits, vanilla, coffee…) within different patterns including complex agroforestry systems. Analyses were conducted in 2016 on both qualitative and quantitative data collected through farmers' surveys on the following topics: i) the plant species grown in local agroforestry systems, ii) farms socio-economic characteristics, and iii) economic evaluation at plot level. A land-use map was built in 2016 through photointerpretation of drone and satellite pictures, and was compared with a map from 1966. The survey showed that a wide diversity of agroforestry practices currently exists on the locality regarding their plant species composition. Agroforestry accounted for 20% of the land surface in the study locality, resulting in a highly heterogeneous landscape mosaic. By merging the analysis of farmers' survey and the diachronic analysis of the land-use map between 1966 and 2016, we were able to give insights on the economic, demographic and geographic processes that led to the observed heterogeneity of agroforestry practices and their spatial patterns. These results raise perspectives to understand the processes involved in agroforestry evolution and expansion in Analanjirofo landscape over the past 50 years. Our results are relevant for supporting the orientation of social-ecological systems toward resilient trajectories.

Crop diversity is pivotal for the 33 millions of small farms that produce most of Africa's food, being the main option for smallholders to deal with limited resources and to cope with a changing environment. Small farms access to crop diversity relies on complex seed supply networks involving multiples actors and sources of diversity, such as other farmers, local markets, NGOs, farmers' organizations, research institutes, or private companies. Regulatory frameworks for access, use and conservation of both seed and plant genetic resources do not recognize the complexity of these seed supply networks, which affects farmers' ability to mobilize crop diversity needed for production and innovation. This opposition between the formal market-oriented seed system and the informal farmer-oriented system is largely documented, while the interaction and intertwining between the different components of seed supply networks and their consequences on crop diversity on-farm have attracted much less attention. This study conducted in the context of CoEx project thus aims at documenting crop diversity management practices in West-African agricultures. It combines largescale analysis in four west-african countries to get a picture of the state of crop diversity management at the regional scale, with in-depth analysis at the local scale in four sites in Senegal and Burkina-Faso to get insights into the mechanisms involved. This study focuses on the interplay between: i.diversity in crop species and varieties cultivated on-farm, ii.their functions in farmers' livelihoods, and iii.the diversity in seed sourcing and actors involved. Recent statistical network analysis methods will be used to disentangle the relations between these components.Through an interdisciplinary approach at the interface between agroecology and social sciences, this study ambitions to document the gap between the diversity of farmers' crop diversity management practices and regulatory frameworks and policies, and to propose innovative governance mechanisms that better account for that diversity.