Actualités

Pl@ntGhats

Bringing out broad scale syntheses on geographical distributions of plant species is quintessential for assessing the size of species’ ranges, identifying species’ assemblages, and sorting out ecological factors influencing distributions of both individual species and plant communities. Such results are requested to manage plant diversity and vegetation resources on a sustainable basis, predict how geographic ranges may be altered by ongoing global changes and assess the relative vulnerability of species and phytocoenoses.

Pl@ntGhats is a case study focusing on the distribution of tree species in the Western Ghats (WG) biodiversity hotspot, which has two complementary components : 1) the development of an integrative data platform in order to gather all available information on occurrences of tree species in the WG, which is expected to initiate a citizen-science activity through a webportal to complement information collected by professional botanists with amateurs’ observations ; 2) based on these data, the modelling of the underlying geographical distribution of individual plant species according to bioclimatic and anthropogenic constraints, which is expected to help in assessing species vulnerability, predicting potential extinction risks due to climate change and increasing anthropogenic pressure, and defining species conservation priorities.

This project in supported by a four-year grant in the framework of Pl@ntNet flagship programme of Agropolis Fondation (http://www.agropolis-fondation.fr). A first visible result expected early in 2010 is the online publication of the IFP herbarium database through its Western Ghats Forest Biodiversity Portal (http://www.ifpindia.org/biodiversityportal/).

Contact : Dr. Raphaël Pélissier / Dr. B. R. Ramesh

Rescuing Tamil Customary Law

This project aims at creating a unique database of documents and recordings regarding customary law in the Tamil region.

Though India’s rich legal history and traditions have attracted great interest from historians, anthropologists and legal scholars, very little is known on actual practices, procedures and legal reasoning of these caste-based judicial assemblies. The lack of scholarship on this important institution is partly explained by the absence of written evidence and records but also the relative scarcity of ethnographic observation.

The urgency of conducting extensive fieldwork on this issue is twofold. On one hand, we know that handwritten documents were produced as of the 1860s, maybe earlier, referring to the settlement of dispute in the village settings. However, they have failed to attract the attention of either historians or anthropologists –and this despite M.N. Srinivas’s entreaty (1959). Such documents, which offer a unique window onto social and judicial features of Tamil rural history, are rapidly deteriorating and therefore need to be located and digitally copied before they quite literally disintegrate.

On the other hand, the project team members (S. Ponnarasu, D. Chakravarthy and V. Kirushnasamy) are also conducting extensive interviews on the issue of contemporary procedures and practices of village judicial assemblies in specific target areas (Kallar Nadu, Kongu Nadu), especially in the sensitive context of the recent criminalisation of this caste-based institution.

This pilot project is funded by the Endangered Archives programme (British Library) supported by Arcadia : http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/homepage.html

Contact : Dr Zoé E. Headley / Dr M. Thanuja

PHARMASUD (India vs. Brazil)

While works on pharmaceutical innovation in the countries of the South have been predominantly centered in the past on the model of technological dependence and transfer of technologies coming from laboratories of northern countries, we study innovation models that stem from southern countries, and that represent alternatives both to the chemical screening model of the post-war era, and to the appropriation systems by means of patents. These models produce local knowledge in response to global constraints ; they contribute towards the emergence of global markets and new regulations with regard to quality and intellectual property. Our research explores in this context new systems of production, mobilisation and transfer of knowledge, related to the invention of drugs in two countries called to play a growing role in the pharmaceutical economy, and more broadly in the world economic regulation, namely India and Brazil.

The three-year Pharmasud Programme (“Local knowledge, market construction and globalisation : two regimes of pharmaceutical innovation in the South”) has been launched in December 2009 under the auspices of the French National Agency for Research (ANR). It is jointly led by the IFP and the CERMES in Paris. The research in India, which is coordinated by the IFP, more specifically examines contemporary innovation in the Ayurvedic industry.

Contact : Dr. Laurent Pordié