The sociodiversity of biodiversity. Interdisciplinary communication and the example of honeybees

Abstract

Environmental issues still tend to be studied and publicly debated from a natural science perspective. However, many ecological problems arise from the direct use of ecosystem resources or less obviously from the indirect consequences of social processes that need to be integrated into socio-ecological research. Using expertise from social and natural sciences in a dialogical way will highlight where shared concepts are necessary and what they could look like. This will emerge from the collaborative research process without the need to come up with a unifying theory in advance. This article promotes the concepts of ‘socioindicators’ and ‘sociodiversity’–as counterparts to ‘bioindicators’ and ‘biodiversity’–in order to allow for better communication between the social and natural sciences. The honeybees are a particularly good test case for this socio-ecological communication.