The Society for Ethnobotany  announced in June that Kate Pitts has received the Richard Evans Schultes Research Award ($5000) to support the second half of her fieldwork in Puerto Nariño, Amazonas, Colombia. Her project titled "Livelihoods, Knowledge, and Chagras: Ethnobotanical Change in the Colombian Amazon". 

This annual award is given to student members of the SEB and is intended to help defray the costs of fieldwork for projects that advance knowledge in the field of ethnobotany. 

Kate's work integrates anthropology and ethnobotany and uses mixed methods: interviews/ethnographic methods, market surveys, household livelihood surveys, chagra inventories, and communal workdays in the chagras called mingas, during which she conducts plant free listing, walking interviews, and create participatory maps with the farmers of their plots.

The primary aim of this research is to understand how small-scale farming communities in the Colombian Amazon adapt to changing socioeconomic conditions, and how these processes impact local knowledge and farming practices. This research contributes primary empirical data linking livelihood diversification, ethnobotanical knowledge, and chagra management and composition in the Colombian Amazon, advancing ethnobotany by conceptualizing TEK as a continually evolving, heterogeneous body of applied knowledge.