Diana Gaza-Gacha

Gloria Yaneth Florez-Yepes

Juan F Fernandez-Manjarrés

Diana Daza-Gacha

Climate policy is a winding road: The example of institutionalizing agro-Climatic Risk Management Expertise in Colombia

Keywords: Climate risk prevention, expert knowledge, El Niño/La Niña

de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

A key aspect of adaptation to climate change in rural areas is the availability of expert teams that can "translate" expert data into understandable facts. Expected impacts of climate change on agricultural systems include increased variability in temperature, precipitation, water availability, and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events [START_REF] Fellmann | The assessment of climate change-related vulnerability in the agricultural sector: reviewing conceptual frameworks[END_REF]. These impacts increase uncertainty and can cause whole crop losses, reduce household incomes, and threaten the food security of producers and their families. Currently, meteorological and agricultural extension services in many developing countries have data that could support decision-making to reduce the impact of these risks. However, this meteorological data is not always available, or the technical language makes it impossible for most rural actors to use for decision making, especially small-scale producers.

In Colombia, climate change is expected to have a significant impact on the agricultural sector.

Due to its location in northern South America, the country is exposed to climate variability influenced by the intertropical confluence zone and the dynamics of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Amazon and Orinoco basins (Garcia et al., 2012). Moreover, it is well documented that the El Niño and La Niña phenomena have caused declines and losses in production for all equatorial countries in the Americas, either due to prolonged rainy seasons or their absence. For 2050, climate analyses indicate that there will be an average temperature increase of 2.5ºC, erratic rainfall and a high prevalence of plagues and diseases, along with greater variability in the El Niño and La Niña phenomena (IPCC).

Since 2012, the "Mesas Técnicas Agro-climáticas" (hereafter MTAs for their acronym in Spanish) have been promoted in Colombia as an initiative for access to agricultural and climatic information (see [START_REF] Loboguerrero | Bridging the gap between climate science and farmers in Colombia[END_REF] for a detailed summary of their origin). MTAs have been designed as spaces for dialogue between actors from the academic, associative, productive and governmental sectors with meteorological services. The MTAs deal with the management of local agricultural and climatic information in order to make forecasts and formulate recommendations to producers as part of a de facto early warning system (CIAT, 2015). The MTAs meet monthly and prepare bulletins based on climate forecasts provided by the meteorological service and make recommendations to reduce the risks associated with climate variability". Because of their uniqueness, they can be considered a success story in climate change adaptation measures [START_REF] Giraldo-Mendez | Mesas Técnicas Agroclimáticas (MTA) : Una guía detallada sobre su implementación, paso a paso. 2da Ed[END_REF].

The MTAs began as a South-South collaborative initiative of FAO and the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), an international consortium for agricultural research that is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The Kaffrine project in Senegal and the MTAs in Colombia shared a common scenario of climate variability in which small-scale producers needed to be supported with effective climate and weather information and support services [START_REF] Lau | Agricultura Colombiana: Adaptación al Cambio Climático[END_REF][START_REF] Bonilla-Findji | How are smallholder farmers coping with and adapting to climate-related shocks in Kaffrine Climate-Smart Village, Senegal[END_REF]. Based on an exchange through CCAFS, Colombian researchers and government officials visited Senegal in 2010 [START_REF] Howland | [END_REF][START_REF] Giraldo-Mendez | Mesas Técnicas Agroclimáticas (MTA) : Una guía detallada sobre su implementación, paso a paso. 2da Ed[END_REF]. At the time of writing, at least nine MTAs are active in Colombia, with several others in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and other countries in Latin America.

Here, we revisit the public policy milestones that led to the institutionalization of MTAs in Colombia as an example of the challenges faced by concrete adaptation measures in the agricultural sector. We identify the different public policies at the international, national, and regional levels related to the institutionalization of MTAs and discuss their relationship with the risk management policies developed in parallel and that paved the way for the formal recognition of MTAs.

Colombia's approach to climate change adaptation policies

In general, decision-making in Colombia on climate change is based on the acquisition of compromises at the international level (Melo, 2014). The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Colombia marked the beginning of regulatory changes and the production of plans or strategies, economic instruments, agreements and, to a lesser extent, institutional changes (Tompkins and Amudsen, 2008). A second normative boom was marked by the Paris Agreement in 2015, when Colombia included the diffusion of MTAs in its international commitments. In fact, the normative antecedents and changes promoted for the Paris Agreement in 2015 have contributed to the creation and dissemination of MTAs in the country, but their institutionalization is a process that concerns the last two years at the time of writing (2021)(2022)(2023). Melo (op. cit.) has identified two phases of agricultural and climatic risk management in Colombia: (i) the period 1994-2010, oriented towards compliance with international compromises, and (ii) the period 2010-2015, marked by the La Niña event of 2010-2011 and a greater engagement with local issues. Our analysis allowed us to update the findings of Melo (op. cit.) and identify a third period (2015 -2023), which includes the creation of the first MTAs in 2014 and their institutionalization. This third period, marked by the El Niño of 2015-2016, is characterized by the search for greater coordination between national and regional climate risk management systems, as we will discuss next.

Managing international agreements (1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010) Since 1). The main impacts identified in this plan were reduced river flows, soil moisture deficits, increased likelihood of forest fires, and yield reductions of 5.5% for permanent crops and 4.4% for non-permanent crops (MADR, 2006). The Prevention Plan includes recommendations for forest fire prevention and monitoring for agricultural production. The recommendations were developed by agro-ecological regions, the Colombian Agricultural Institute and trade unions. In addition, the plan includes as policy instruments of the Ministry of Agriculture: (i) lines of credit with preferential interest rates, (ii) a plan for subsequent compensation, and (iii) incentives for milk storage (MADR, 2006). A second version of this plan was prepared in 2009. This plan does not provide explicit guidelines to ensure forecasts of the intensity of the "El Niño" phenomenon, and the recommendations are classified only by crop, without taking into account the geographical variation of Colombia, since not all regions are equally exposed to El Niño. (MADR, 2009).

The foregoing highlights the fact that, for the period 1994-2010, the damage to the agricultural sector was recognized, but institutional articulation remained very weak and linked mainly to the large unions of rice and cotton producers and the like, rather than to the small producers of coffee and cacao, for example. In the following years, the government's actions were in line with international compromises, but with a growing awareness of the need to work within a local context.

From national approaches to local context (2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) The plans for preventing and mitigating the effects of the "El Niño" phenomenon published in 2006 and 2009 did not take into account the other climatic extreme associated with ENSO: "La Niña". However, between 2010 and 2011, it was the "La Niña" phenomenon that caused losses in all sectors due to excessive rainfall that not only facilitated the spread of diseases in the agricultural sector, but also several landslides that affected roads and aqueducts in several areas of Colombia (FAO, 2021, p. 7). As a result, the National Planning Department asked the World Bank to carry out a public policy risk assessment after the first cross-sectoral integration effort, embodied in the 2011 document CONPES 3700 "Institutional Strategy for the Articulation of Climate Change Policies and Actions in Colombia" (Figure 1). The years that followed were characterized by the restructuring of risk management in Colombia, particularly in terms of normative changes and the diversification of instruments that were initially reactive, but later oriented towards proactive risk reduction and adaptation to climate change.

Although these provisions did not explicitly include a clear instrument for agricultural adaptation, the foundation for an expanded view of environmental, physical, and agricultural risks began to take shape.

According to the 2012 World Bank study [START_REF] Campos | Análisis de la gestión del riesgo de desastres en Colombia Un aporte para la construcción de políticas públicas[END_REF], several factors explain the increase in climate risks in Colombia. Before the year in which the study was published, the increase in risks was mostly associated with inadequate territorial, sectoral and private management. This poor management was explained by (i) the absence of government policies for public management of risks; (ii) failures in the application of policies and instruments for territorial planning and watershed management; and (iii) the difficulty of the private sector and citizens in assuming their role in risk management. Other factors taken into account are the country's geomorphological, hydrological and climatic diversity and the increase in the population at risk due to uncontrolled urban and rural expansion (Campos et al., op. cit.) In response to the national context and World Bank recommendations, an update of the 1989 National System for Disaster Prevention and Preparedness was adopted. In 2012, the National System for Disaster Risk Management was created by Law 1523 with three main objectives: (i) risk knowledge, (ii) risk reduction, and (iii) disaster management (Figure 1). More specifically, this law establishes obligations for public institutions, such as the creation of local risk management plans and the incorporation of risk in public investments. The main actors in charge of this system for disaster risk management were the director of the National Risk Management Unit (created in 2015) and a network of governors and mayors. However, the articulation of actors around climate change adaptation and risk management was left to the regional environmental management institutions, called Regional Autonomous Corporations2 , for which these regional organizations were not yet ready.

In summary, the regional institutions understood that they were now responsible for dealing with different types of risks and disasters, including the risks of climate change, but they lacked concrete spaces for dealing with weather forecasts, understanding technical data and communicating them regularly to the agricultural sector. Since the MTAs were already at an experimental stage, thanks to the international consortium led by FAO and CIGIAR, the exercise of connecting the dots between institutions to address the climate risks of the agricultural sector was already underway.

Institutionalization: from the Paris Agreement to local agricultural risk management (2015 -present)

A normative boom, marked by Colombia's participation in COP 21, can explain the plethora of policy instruments created in Colombia after the Paris Agreement in 2015. A year after the agreement, a cross-cutting initiative to address climate change risks was implemented in 2016 for the creation of a National Climate Change System, known locally as SYSCLIMA (Figure 1). The National Climate Change System was already foreseen in CONPES document 3700 of 2011, but it was only institutionalized by Decree 298 of 24 February 2016 of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development.

It is worth noting that one of the Colombian approaches to policy implementation is the institutionalization of nationwide networks, called "systems," capable of coordinating the cooperation of different actors at different levels and at different times. For example, before climate change became a major concern, a system for addressing environmental and biodiversity issues had been in place since Second, in order to integrate the regional MTAs in Colombia into a national MTA, a draft resolution was proposed in 2022 for the creation of a national body of experts to coordinate regional actions (MADR, 2022). The draft resolution calls for the institutionalization of a national-level MTA, and instance that already exists. This draft provides the operational means to reduce the negative impacts of climate phenomena at the national level, and the adoption of guidelines for the operation of MTAs at the regional level. With regard to regional MTAs, the draft establishes a decentralized approach for governors, the highest authority of each department, to establish MTAs with the main actors in the territory in terms of climate expertise and the agricultural sector (MADR, 2022). However, at the time of writing, it is not known whether the draft will become a ministerial decree or not.

Concluding remarks

In summary, for concrete adaptation actions to be successful and sustainable over time, they need not only policy instruments, but also an institutional "ecosystem" ready to support them. For the MTAs, the immediate ecosystem is provided by the so-called "climate change nodes", which have been provided for since 2016 in the same ministerial decree that created the National Climate Change Network mentioned in the previous paragraphs (for a detailed description, see Rodríguez-Granados et al. 2020). These nodes form a network of focal points where the impacts of climate change on all sectors are analyzed and discussed by experts from institutions, academia, government, and stakeholders. In addition, the regional climate hubs actively contribute to scientific knowledge and research at the regional level.

Today, the existence of the MTAs would not be possible without the human and scientific support of the climate change nodes (F. Florez-Yepes, pers. obs.) If other countries are considering creating expert spaces to address climate change adaptation, looking at whether there is an institutional ecosystem to support them will greatly increase the chances of success.

  the adoption of the UNFCCC in 1994, the Colombian State has submitted a series of National Communications to the Secretariat of the Convention and has reached compromises for the creation of groups dedicated to climate change mitigation. In 2002, the National Planning Department (DNP) and the Ministry of the Environment published the Guidelines for Climate Change Policy in Colombia and created the Colombian Office for Climate Change Mitigation within the Ministry of the Environment (Figure1). This office lasted until 2005, when it was replaced by a more ambitious Climate Change Mitigation Group. The aim of these first guidelines was to establish strategies for dealing with climate change within the framework of international instruments. These guidelines identified rice, tree tomato, wheat and potato as the most vulnerable crops. They also highlighted the potential impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector, such as reduced edaphic supply, increased desertification and loss of soil productivity (Ministry of theEnvironment and DNP, 2002).

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Public policy milestones that have directly and indirectly led to the creation of spaces for expert knowledge transfer for the agricultural sector to address the impacts of climate change. The rectangles roughly represent the extent and magnitude of El Niño (red tones) and La Niña events (blue tones), which are particularly strong in equatorial countries such as Colombia. MoE refers to the ministry of the Environment and MoA to the ministry of Agriculture. For the reader is referred to the text.

1993 3 .

 3 This new national system was later strengthened by the Climate Change Management Directives of Law 1931 of 2018. This law explicitly incorporates the National Disaster Risk Management System 4 into the Intersectoral Commission on Climate Change, part of the SYSCLIMA structure, in order to close the previous gaps in cooperation between the Ministries of Environment and Trade. The National Disaster Risk Management System has links that extend to the different departments (provinces) of Colombia, which in turn extend to the level of municipalities within the departments. So where does knowledge sharing by agricultural experts fit into all of this? None of the public policies briefly reviewed here explicitly addressed MTAs as we know them today, but they set the stage for their implementation. Prior to the Paris Agreement, the first two MTAs were established in 2014 in the departments of Córdoba and Cauca (Figure 2). Then, in 2015, two more were created in the departments of Sucre and Magdalena. After COP 21, the country reached a compromise to create 15 MTAs as part of the Nationally Determined Contributions for the benefit of one million producers.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Distribution of the nine MTAs that are active in Colombia at the time of writing. They cover different ecosystems ranging from dry tropical forests in the north, tropical moist forests and the Andean region.

The National Council of Economic and Social Policy (CONPES) was created by Law 19 of 1958. It is Colombia's highest national planning authority and serves as an advisory body to the government on all aspects related to the country's economic and social development (https://www.dnp.gov.co/conpes).

The Regional Corporations are the oldest natural resource management institutions in Colombia. They were modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the mid-1950s, when flood control was the primary concern. The creation of the Ministry of the Environment in 1993 created tensions, as elements of redundancy appeared and their autonomy seemed threatened. These tensions continue to this day.

https://www.minambiente.gov.co/ordenamiento-ambiental-territorial-y-sistema-nacional-ambiental-sina/

https://portal.gestiondelriesgo.gov.co/


Juan Fernández-Manjarrés
email: juan.fernandez@universite-paris-saclay.fr

Principles for interdisciplinary research in social-ecological research: using analogical reasoning to build epistemological bridges

Keywords: ecological principles, interdisciplinarity, graduate education, social sciences

There is ample consensus that interdisciplinarity between ecology and the social sciences is a prerequisite for solving complex biodiversity and environmental problems. However, differences in theories, concepts, methods, and data types hamper the efforts of many young students or experienced researchers in ecology that have not been exposed to the social sciences before. This paper argues that for certain types of questions where parallels can be drawn through analogical thinking between the ecological and social sciences, extending the set of principles of ecological theory from Scheiner and Willig (2008) can facilitate interdisciplinary research. The extended principles presented here build on notions of spatial patterns, interactions, contingency and temporal change (evolution) that are also studied by the social sciences. The proposed non-mutually exclusive principles belong to two main types depending on the study object: i) humans per se as ecological agents and ii) ecological knowledge in the broadest sense. Examples are given from the literature of ecological scientists borrowing methods from the social sciences and vice versa, and asking questions similar to the extended principles proposed here. The extended principles can be used as a starting point for students of ecology to tackle complex problems, encouraging further interdisciplinarity in a more systematic way. A tentative curriculum for a graduate seminar discussing the different principles is provided at the end of the text.

Introduction

What do the ecological models of prey-predators, ideal free distribution and ecosystem function have in common? That they all have helped develop ideas by analogical reasoning in the social sciences. The principles of predator-prey models of Lotka and Volterra, originally borrowed from chemical reaction dynamics, have been used widely including the behavior of stock markets [START_REF] Marasco | Market share dynamics using Lotka-Volterra models[END_REF]. Ideal free distribution studies originally developed for understanding how animals minimize competition, have been applied to understand the patterns of nomad pastoralism and patch resource [START_REF] Moritz | Ideal Free Distributions of Mobile Pastoralists in Multiple Seasonal Grazing Areas[END_REF]. Currently, ecosystem theory is informing enterprise management studies [START_REF] Hou | Ecosystem-as-structure and ecosystem-as-coevolution: A constructive examination[END_REF]Shi 2021, Tsujimoto et al. 2018).

Likewise, ideas from the social sciences have allowed several important breakthroughs in ecology and evolution. For instance, the familiar formulas of gene diversity were borrowed from early 20 th century studies in economics [START_REF] Stirling | A general framework for analysing diversity in science, technology and society[END_REF]. Perhaps the most famous example of analogue thinking between the social sciences and ecology and evolution were the insights Charles Darwin got from reading Humboldt's accounts of human population differences in the Canary Islands. As population size was uncorrelated to island size but rather to resource availability, Humboldt's readings of Malthus human population growth hinted him that resource availability was the limiting factor as the larger islands were not necessarily the most populated. A straight forward analogy for Darwin to explain resource competition and population growth was then finally available [START_REF] Egerton | Humboldt, Darwin, and population[END_REF].

Analogical reasoning is a well-known step in interdisciplinary research [START_REF] Newell | A theory of interdisciplinary studies[END_REF][START_REF] Szostak | Interdisciplinary research as a creative design process[END_REF]). Ideas from one discipline often get adapted and transformed within another discipline without implying that the borrowing discipline presents a weaker theoretical foundation than the borrower. The analogical phase is not alone during an interdisciplinary process, and is part of a larger creative process that includes observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, forming patterns, modeling, transforming, and synthesizing among others (for an in-depth analysis see [START_REF] Spooner | Generating integration and complex understanding: Exploring the use of creative thinking tools within interdisciplinary studies[END_REF]). This kind of interdisciplinary that borrows concepts has been called 'informed disciplinarity' where disciplinary questions require outreach to one or more disciplines [START_REF] Lattuca | Creating interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary research and teaching among college and university faculty[END_REF][START_REF] Musacchio | Changing landscapes, changing disciplines: seeking to understand interdisciplinarity in landscape ecological change research[END_REF]. This is different from questions that seek to link disciplines to create new disciplines by synthesis, or whose objective is to transcend from the science circles to decision makers and stakeholders (transdisciplinarity).

If an iterative borrowing process happens for long time, maybe a new subdiscipline or field may emerge, as molecular ecology or landscape ecology, to cite two familiar interdisciplinary fields. This process of interdisciplinary borrowing work may take decades of sorting success from dead-ends and may or may not, call for an overreaching theoretical synthesis beyond the anecdotic analogy. The farther the distance between the disciplines involved, the harder it appears to find any bridges that can initiate an interdisciplinary dialog, a situation well known between ecology and the social sciences [START_REF] Barthel | Interdisciplinary Collaboration between Natural and Social Sciences -Status and Trends Exemplified in Groundwater Research[END_REF].

The biodiversity and environmental crises that we are currently experiencing have challenged and continue to challenge the disciplinary structure of faculties across the world. This is not a new issue, but something that has been on the agenda of several higher education institutions for at least 30 years now [START_REF] Newell | A theory of interdisciplinary studies[END_REF][START_REF] Pickett | Interdisciplinary research: Maintaining the constructive impulse in a culture of criticism[END_REF]. Graduate and post-graduate education programs need to keep up pace with complex societal demands if they are to survive in the long term. Collaboration between social scientists and applied ecological practitioners has gained momentum in conservation science [START_REF] Hintzen | Relationship between conservation biology and ecology shown through machine reading of 32,000 articles[END_REF], and its collaboration has been widely promoted for several years [START_REF] Lowe | Why social scientists should engage with natural scientists[END_REF][START_REF] Lowe | Ecology and the social sciences[END_REF]. In this regard, conservation biology is currently viewed within the broader field of conservation science using approaches that now include work at the scale of social-ecological systems [START_REF] Mace | Whose conservation?[END_REF] with concepts like environmental justice placed at the fore [START_REF] Gould | Seizing opportunities to diversify conservation[END_REF]. Likewise, calls for joint work between the natural and social sciences have been repeatedly made in sustainability studies [START_REF] Clark | Sustainability Science: Toward a Synthesis[END_REF]. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of consensus about how to generate the kind of interdisciplinary required, mainly because of the large number of disciplines and subdisciplines potentially involved in interdisciplinary research. For instance, sustainability research has been described as an "archipelago" of disciplines [START_REF] Haberl | Social ecology: Society-nature relations across time and space[END_REF] where interdisciplinarity is dictated by the questions at hand, and collaborations are idiosyncratic.

Lack of exposure to different epistemological frameworks (theories, concepts, methods, and data) during undergraduate and graduate studies are commonly cited by graduate students as recurrent obstacles for effective interdisciplinarity [START_REF] Killion | Preparing the next generation of sustainability scientists[END_REF]. Indeed, words of caution have recently been expressed, as hasty interdisciplinarity by ecologists may produce research without theoretical depth, and in some cases, it may even provide wrong insights regarding human decision processes [START_REF] Cooper | Advice for collaborations among natural and social scientists[END_REF]. The question thus arises as to how to better train students who can potentially call on interdisciplinarity to engage in a dialogue with colleagues in other disciplines if the question at hand so requires it without losing the perspective of their own fields.

What exactly is expected from ecologists?

As the ecological sciences are a collection of disciplines [START_REF] Cooper | The science of the struggle for existence: on the foundations of ecology[END_REF][START_REF] Mcintosh | The background of ecology: concept and theory[END_REF], ecologists are as varied as they come. However, ecologists are appealed to as experts, not only because ecology is seen as the science of interactions (which follows from its more frequent definition), but also because there is an "ecological perspective" when looking at problems. Ecologists' contribution can include, among others, theories, concepts, and methods to study the spatial and temporal distribution of organisms, contingent events that have shaped past and current biodiversity, and the study of constant biotic and abiotic change omnipresent in all environments affecting one organism in one way or another. An ecological perspective would therefore involve identifying very general concepts that can be understood by different disciplines. Some fundamental general concepts or principles in ecology have already been identified by Samuel M. Scheiner, Michael R. Willig, and others, as components of an ongoing construction of a general theory of ecology [START_REF] Scheiner | Toward a conceptual framework for biology[END_REF][START_REF] Scheiner | A general theory of ecology[END_REF][START_REF] Scheiner | The theory of ecology[END_REF][START_REF] Vellend | Conceptual synthesis in community ecology[END_REF], 2020). The challenge would therefore be to ask whether these ecological principles, if extended, could guide students from their foundations in ecology toward an interdisciplinary dialogue with the social sciences, without replacing the perspectives of the latter.

Here, as an educator rather than a philosopher of science, I would like to address some practical challenges faced by students trained in the natural sciences. To this end, I will first extend by analogy the eight principles of ecological theory proposed by [START_REF] Scheiner | A general theory of ecology[END_REF] to outline potential interdisciplinary links between some ecological concepts and analogous ideas in the social sciences; second, I will provide some examples from the literature that address issues similar to the extended principles to demonstrate their usefulness; and finally, I will outline an introductory syllabus to help students and educators in ecology initiate a dialogue with the social sciences.

Using a suitable definition of ecology

Before elaborating their principles, Scheiner and Willig opted for a less common definition of the ecological sciences. In contrast to the more widespread definition of ecology as the science that studies the relations between organisms and their biotic and abiotic environment, these authors used a slightly different description: "The study of the spatial and temporal patterns of the distribution and abundance of organisms, including causes and consequences" [START_REF] Scheiner | A general theory of ecology[END_REF]. They explain that the word "causes" encapsulates the environmental limitations that determine why organisms occur where they do. In turn, the word "consequences," encapsulates the process of competition, exclusion and of course the functional aspects of energy and matter flows resulting from their distribution, among others.

Principles of ecology: The starting point of an interdisciplinary dialogue

The word "principles" has been used in various ways in relation to scientific disciplines. For many authors, when we refer to principles it is frequent to state the obvious, and sometimes are called "truisms". Here, we also retain the definition of principles given by [START_REF] Scheiner | A general theory of ecology[END_REF] as "broad statements about empirical patterns and the processes that operate within a [research] domain." In the context of ecology, the research domain or main subject of study defined by these authors is "the spatial and temporal patterns of the distribution and abundance of organisms, including causes and consequences" which follows the above definition.

The question that naturally follows is thus: what are some potential domain of interdisciplinary studies that ecologists may conduct in collaboration with social scientists? For many current scholars, this domain already exist and it would be the social-ecological system [START_REF] Levin | Social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems: modeling and policy implications[END_REF]. Here, I prefer to present a domain description that is not based on the theory of complex adaptive systems on which social-ecological system research relies.

Instead, I approach the issue of defining the domain at an even more general level as the "spatial and temporal patterns of the distribution and abundance of humans within ecosystems, including causes and consequences" (my own definition). This definition of the domain will fit many disciplines like geography, history, ecological anthropology, and environmental sociology, which allows us to focus on similarities between disciplines instead of their differences. Many readers would argue, with reason, that this domain is not new and that it has been the raison d'être of the branch of sociology known as human ecology [START_REF] Christensen | Human Ecology as Philosophy[END_REF][START_REF] Visvader | Philosophy and Human Ecology[END_REF][START_REF] Young | Human ecology as an interdisciplinary concept: a critical inquiry[END_REF], which is perfectly coherent with the reasoning I am trying to develop here.

In addition to studying the causes and consequences of the distribution of humans as stated above, interdisciplinarity would further be facilitated in some cases if a second related domain were proposed, namely that of "studying the causes and consequences of the distribution of ecological knowledge" (my own definition, Figure 1). Before continuing, the expression "ecological knowledge" needs some clarification. In contrast to a dichotomy between local ecological knowledge and expert knowledge [START_REF] Davis | Constructing confidence: rational skepticism and systematic enquiry in local ecological knowledge research[END_REF]Ruddle 2010, Lam et al. 2020), I propose using a more general definition. First of all knowledge, we may adopt the definition of [START_REF] Renn | The globalization of knowledge in history and its normative challenges[END_REF]) "as the capacity of an individual or a group to solve problems and to mentally anticipate the corresponding actions." It thus follows that "ecological knowledge" can be conceived as "as the capacity of an individual or a group to solve ecological problems and to mentally anticipate the corresponding actions" (my own definition). Here, ecological problems would be anything from understanding agriculture, forestry, fisheries, husbandry, watershed management, and so forth. In line with Figure 1, the subject of certain interdisciplinary studies such as human ecology or anthropology could be seen as part of a tripartite typology: some studies address humans within ecological systems, others focus on people's knowledge about their supporting ecosystems and how that knowledge is maintained and shared, and finally, some explore both aspects. The domain space depicted in Figure 1 cannot account for all possible types of interdisciplinarity that exist or can exist between the ecological sciences and the human sciences, but just a subset of them. [START_REF] Scheiner | Toward a conceptual framework for biology[END_REF]Willig (2008, 2011) published their principles aimed at contributing to a general theory of ecology, while cautioning readers that their postulates may be incomplete and that other researchers could come up with a different set of principles. We transcribe these principles in Table 1, mostly using the 2011 version of the principles that differ slightly from the 2008 version. Bear in mind that the order in which the principles are presented do not imply a hierarchy. Some principles are exclusive to the ecological sciences, while some are shared with other scientific branches (see the original publication). In this context, "heterogeneous" can be replaced by "non-random". [START_REF] Scheiner | Toward a conceptual framework for biology[END_REF]Willig (2008, 2011). The labels E1-E8 were added to facilitate the identification of each principle.

Scheiner and Willig's eight principles of ecology

Label

Transcribed ecological principle

E1

Organisms are distributed in space and time in a heterogeneous manner

E2

Organisms interact with their abiotic and biotic environments

E3

Variation in the characteristics of organisms result in heterogeneous ecological patterns and process

E4

Distributions of organisms and their interactions depend on contingencies

E5

Environmental conditions are heterogeneous in space and time

E6

Resources are finite and heterogeneous in space and time

E7

Birth and death rates are the consequence of interactions with the abiotic and biotic environments (originally, this principle was defined as "all organisms are mortal.")

E8

Species ecological properties result from evolution

Extending the principles beyond the ecological sciences

Through analogical reasoning, I propose here that the original eight principles of Scheiner and Willig can first be elaborated for humans as the study object, and second, for ecological knowledge as the study object (hopefully without upsetting our colleagues in the social sciences too much!). The extended principles, like the original ones, are built on what we can call an ecological perspective consisting of the following: i) spatial patterns, ii) interactions, iii) contingency, and iv) notions of change (evolution). These notions are not exclusive to the ecological thinking as they are used in the social sciences too. Hence, they can be used as starting points to help students from an ecological background ask whether there is a need for an ecological perspective when addressing a question mostly about humans, mostly about ecological knowledge, or both (Figure 2). Before analyzing each possible extended principle, we depict them to show their relation to the original principles (Figure 3), shown as a continuous gradient of the three domains depicted in Figure 1. As with the original principles, these extended principles are complementary to each other, not mutually exclusive, and without a hierarchy. Two of the principles were not elaborated for humans because they can be considered to apply to all living organisms: principle E5 (Environmental conditions are heterogeneous in space and time) and E6 (Resources are finite and heterogeneous in space and time) are thus depicted the same as in Figure 2. Some analogies are also not possible between humans and ecological knowledge as study objects, resulting in fewer principles for ecological knowledge than for the other categories.

How close or far removed are these extended principles from existing interdisciplinary research? Examples from the scientific literature of the different fields can shed light on their utility. Tables 2 and3 enumerate the extended principles while providing examples from the literature in which this kind of thinking has been used. The first three principles proposed for humans (H1, H2, and H3) are familiar in studies exploring the ecological properties of the human species. In particular, principle H3 is the most interdisciplinary (Humans interact with their abiotic, biotic, and social (other humans) environments), because it can be addressed from the perspective of the ecological sciences, the social sciences, or both. In a way, if there is one principle that would hold across many research questions, it would be this one.

Likewise, principle H4 is highly interdisciplinary, because human demographic parameters are a function of both the biotic environment and human interactions, as wars and conflicts can have demographic consequences that are just as catastrophic as diseases or pandemics, and often they are related.

Historical processes (i.e., time related) lie at the core of principles H5 and H6: the former focuses on the order of events and the path dependencies that are set in motion, while the latter directly mentions human ecological capacities as the result of biological and social evolution. In this context, "contingencies" mean not only the uniqueness of a situation, but also the random processes that create structure like genetic founding effects. For instance, the order of events during the colonization of empty niches has important consequences on the structuring of natural communities [START_REF] Fukami | Historical contingency in community assembly: integrating niches, species pools, and priority effects[END_REF], an idea that can be transposed by analogy to situations that involve humans, with all the similarities and differences that exist.

Principles relating to knowledge are less straightforward to extend by analogy, because it is widely believed knowledge, but especially culture, is a human exception. While it is known that many vertebrates can teach their young how to find feeding spots and that primates are capable of social learning (see for example [START_REF] Whiten | Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees[END_REF], scholars still do not agree whether these behaviors and information transmission are equivalent to human culture [START_REF] Tennie | Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture[END_REF]. In general, knowledge is a subject of many fields, traditionally philosophy, but it is also central to anthropology [START_REF] Crick | Anthropology of Knowledge[END_REF] and sociology [START_REF] Shapin | Here and everywhere: Sociology of scientific knowledge[END_REF]. For this reason, we can expect that any principle related to knowledge developed by analogy may be ill fitted if not wrong in many cases. Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument, let us accept that under certain circumstances, a broad research domain of "ecological knowledge" is a useful study object to which ecologically oriented questions (spatial patterns, interactions, contingency, and evolution notions) may be relevant, especially if they help shed light on the distribution of the human species and their interactions with other humans or other species.

Probably one of the most useful principle is EK2 (Variations in ecological knowledge result in heterogeneous management practices), as this may sum up the core of many studies in conservation biology, conservation sciences, and sustainability. This principle can easily be used to frame hypotheses and help comparative studies to establish cause-effect processes when various landscapes and regions are examined. Clearly, EK2 it is a principle to be used in complement or in parallel to an anthropological and sociological analysis of the causes of these variations in ecological knowledge. Almost invariably, a historical approach will address the questions of the contingency and change of ecological knowledge (principles EK4 and EK5) using geographical, anthropological, or cultural evolution approaches. Principle EK3 is needed, because there will always be "unknown unknowns" limiting the level of agency that any people or culture may exert over an ecosystem. As for EK1 (Ecological knowledge is distributed in space and time in a heterogeneous manner), it joins the other first principles, E1 and H1, which together are the most intuitive and general principles of all.

Principles in practice

A common surprise or frustration for students trained in ecology when participating in an interdisciplinary research project is that the ecological sciences are usually used as a mere diagnostic tool. However, questions can be asked from another perspective. For instance, to assess the impact of a development project, the questions can arise in a gradient similar to what is shown in Figures 1 and2: What is the distribution of not only the endangered species but all the species present (principle E1)? How does the distribution of these species correlate with the distribution of humans in the area (principle H1)? What kind of knowledge (or lack thereof) do these humans have with respect to the management of these species (EK2 and EK3)? And which historical events can explain these patterns of knowledge (EK4 and EK5)? A second application of the principles would occur in the context of common pool resources. The use of common pool resources depends on the rules and norms that regulate access, which result from the complex histories and institutional development of the actors involved (Ostrom 2009b) within the context of a social-ecological system (Ostrom 2009a). At the core of this kind of analysis, there is principle H3: humans interact with their abiotic, biotic, and social (other humans) environments. Human interactions are addressed by sociology and institutional economics, not to mention public policy studies. If a historical perspective is needed, principle H5 (contingency of human distributions) would be explicit in the analysis, as human populations develop around key resources, a recurrent theme in geography and history.

Using the extended principles for teaching interdisciplinarity

If there is any practical use of the extended principles outlined above, it would be to help teaching some possible interdisciplinary connections that exist between the ecological and the social sciences. For instance, an interdisciplinary seminar1 could be envisaged for middle to advanced graduate students (Table 4), ideally inviting researchers from other fields to lead the discussions. Reviews of the main ideas in sociology, anthropology, political science, history and physical and human geographies could be potentially discussed around the principles before students prepare their dissertation projects. A hybrid lecturing/ seminar approach in which each person dwells in depth on a subject allowing for critical thinking and discussion, could allow the discovery of other fields not only by students but by faculty themselves. Whether more principles, or simply other principles are needed to foster interdisciplinarity, will probably emerge through these discussion prompting curiosity about the other fields of research in both directions.

Concluding remarks

I do not claim or imply that it is enough to simply use some analog concepts to create a new interdisciplinary stable field, whether it is the ecological sciences that borrow from social sciences or vice versa. Only, that these extended principles may be useful in certain cases to answer specific questions. Our main goal here was to highlight similarities of underlying processes studied by both the ecological and social sciences, as often it is the case that it is the differences among them that are emphasized [START_REF] Moon | A Guide to Understanding Social Science Research for Natural Scientists[END_REF]. Many scholars will argue that similarities are just superficial and that questions cannot be answered isolated from a disciplinary context, a position I agree with. The ecologist will still give her/his perspective and the social scientist theirs to the problem at hand based on their own set of values issued from each discipline. The use of very extended principles developed here do not call for any need of one discipline superseding another one but for an epistemic pluralism [START_REF] Persson | Toward an alternative dialogue between the social and natural sciences[END_REF], in which each discipline stands by its own right.

The same exercise could have been done in the other direction, by starting with the social sciences and then asking the question about what they can contribute in an interdisciplinary context to the ecological sciences. The use of terms such as population, community, and association in plant ecology is not fortuitous, as they entered into ecological thinking in the late 19 th century at a time when both ecology and the social sciences were burgeoning [START_REF] Egerton | History of ecological sciences, part 54: succession, community, and continuum[END_REF]. Today, the wealth of research in both the ecological and social sciences shows that the ideas of spatial variation, contingency, change in time, and so forth are not the exclusive prerogative of the ecology, far from that. However, being aware of these notions and principles may help both educators and students to better understand how scientific knowledge is developed by the different disciplines when the question at hand calls for more than one scientific field.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Studies about our own species are within a gradient of disciplines that span two extremes: on the one hand, the study of organisms themselves, and on the other, the study of ecological knowledge (sensu lato) that cannot be dissociated of the presence of humans themselves. In our case, the type of human knowledge of interest to us is the ecological knowledge that we use to survive and fulfill our essential needs. The central circle largely represents the subject of anthropology, human ecology and related fields. Interdisciplinarity would arise in some cases at the intersection of each object or domain.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Series of check questions to identify whether the ecological sciences can bring additional insights into studies of humans or ecological knowledge. If the answer is 'no' to all the questions, this means that the issue at hand is better handled by the social sciences.

Figure 3 .

 3 Figure 3. Extended principles drawing from Sheiller and Willig(2008, 2011), elaborated for humans (H1-H6) and ecological knowledge (EK1-EK5) as the objects of study (see Figure1). Two of the original principles (E5 & E6) apply to all living organisms and do not need to be elaborated. The order of the original ecological principles was changed to bring together those relating to spatial patterns, interactions, contingency and change.

  Humans are distributed in space and time in a heterogeneous manner[START_REF] Hodder | The non-random spacing of Romano-British walled towns[END_REF] analyzed the non-random distribution of Roman towns in England using the "central place theory," a concept still widely used in urban studies[START_REF] Hsu | Central place theory and city size distribution[END_REF], along with fractal (power law) analyses of urban phenomena[START_REF] Mori | Common power laws for cities and spatial fractal structures[END_REF] H2. Variations in human biological characteristics result in heterogeneous ecological patterns and processes linked to humansThe emergence of lactose tolerance allowed husbandry and thus modified landscapes in Africa and Europe[START_REF] Cramp | Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Ingram | Population genetics of lactase persistence and lactose intolerance[END_REF] Interactions H3. Humans interact with their abiotic, biotic, and social (other humans) environments A review of archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets (300-12 thousand years ago) by[START_REF] Roberts | Defining the 'generalist specialist'niche for Pleistocene Homo sapiens[END_REF] suggests that compared to the genus Homo, our species developed a new ecological niche (i.e., "generalist specialist") by occupying a diversity of environments, but also specialized in some environmental extremes H4. Human birth and death rates are a consequence of interactions with the abiotic, biotic, and social environments Analysis of radiocarbon databases in the Amazon and Orinoco regions allowed the authors to test the hypothesis of a logistic growth of pre-Columbian populations, suggesting that carrying capacity was reached and maintained durably in the region (Arroyo-Kalin and Riris 2021) Contingency H5. Distributions of humans and their interactions depend on contingencies Any study addressing indigenous displacements because of colonialist or post-colonialist practices; the current rural exodus in European countries because of economic crises (Merino and Prats 2020); any study exploring the causes of the current migration patterns Change H6. Human ecological properties result from biological evolution (James et al. 2019) review evidence of how the available nutrients from the food selected in different areas of the during the expansion of Homo sapiens for lactose tolerance, increased amylase for digesting starchy foods, ability to digest long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, and ability to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight exposure

  Murrieta 2018) analyze how the loss of swidden cultivation entails the loss of ecological knowledge about animal species in indigenous communities in south-eastern Brazil; lessons from colonialism imposing alien land use (Paterson 2018) Change EK5. Ecological knowledge results from cultural evolution Any study addressing how knowledge is transmitted across generations, and how variations in practices are a consequence of knowledge change over time. See, for instance, the review of (Santoro et al. 2018) on the fields of cultural evolution and evolutionary ethnobiology. In this context, evolution is considered in the broadest sense as change

Table 1 .

 1 Transcribed ecological principles based on the works of

Table 2 .

 2 Selected, non-exhaustive list of examples in the literature asking questions akin to the extended ecological principles when humans are considered as the study object.

Table 3 .

 3 Selected, non-exhaustive list of examples in the literature asking questions akin to the extended ecological principles when ecological knowledge is considered as the study object (see text for the definition of ecological knowledge). No interaction principles were developed for ecological knowledge to avoid over-interpretation of analogies with ecology.

	Extended principle

Table 4 .

 4 Example of a seminar curriculum for graduate students built around the extended principles. Contents would vary depending on the availability of different faculty, as well as the subjects chosen to discuss. Rows marked with an asterisk (*) correspond to subjects generally taught in biology departments and faculties.

	Main Subject	Week	Subject of seminar	Discussed Main Principles	Disciplines	Potential Subjects (non-exhaustive list)
			Heterogeneous and
		1	limited distribution of	E5; E6	Earth sciences*; Demography*	Planetary boundaries; Understanding human population growth
			resources
	Spatial patterns	2	Heterogeneous Human distribution	H1; H2	Archaeology; history; human geography	History of human colonization of the biosphere; Glaciations & human dispersal;
		3	Heterogeneous knowledge distribution	EK1-Ek3 anthropology; philosophy	Cosmologies of western and non-western cultures; the notion of nature in different cultures
		4	Human/non-human interactions	H5	Ecology*; conservation biology*	Humans as super-predators
	Interactions
		5	Human/human interactions	H2	Law; Institutional economics; political studies; sociology	The law as a social regulator of human interactions; managing common pool resources; gender inequalities and environmental justice
			Contingencies
	Contingency	6	creating human distributions and	H5/EK4	Archaeology; history; human geography	ecological and social consequences of different colonization/wars events in history
			ecological knowledge
	Change	7	Human ecological properties through time	H6; EK5	Archaeology; history; human geography	Origins of agriculture; origins of urbanization; industrial revolution

In North American graduate programs, seminars are graduate level courses in which each student presents her/his take on a given subject which is then discussed by all the peer students