Contribution short abstract:

In the Philippines, community-based conservation aiming to restore forests often relies on external support due to a lack of native seeds and seedlings. Expanding the “community”, I examine how bottom-up networks circulate seeds and knowledge to enable and shape future multispecies communities.

Contribution long abstract:

How to enable multispecies communities in an altered archipelago? Following centuries of colonial rule in which Philippine forest landscapes were displaced, governmental agencies replaced biodiverse forests mainly with a small number of non-Philippine tree species. As a result, community-based conservation efforts interested in restoring native forests to recreate thriving habitats face a central problem: where to find different kinds of native seeds and seedlings?

In the last decade, interest in native plants and trees has grown in the Philippines leading to the establishment of several local and scientific initiatives aiming to address this problem. These new bottom-up reforestation communities and networks try to shift governmental reforestation paradigms. They circulate seeds and knowledge throughout their networks and train people – and even whole communities – in native tree planting.

Examining these practices, I aim to expand the concept of “community” in community-based conservation to highlight the role of knowledge exchange through newly emerging reforestation networks. These networks open up space to negotiate ideas about the “proper” relations to and belonging of non-human actors, especially in contexts in which governmental agencies have effectively reduced species diversity. By following the seeds, I show how circulated knowledge of trees and forest landscapes not only enables community-based conservation efforts in the first place but also shapes how future multispecies communities are envisioned.