Dr. Alasdair O’Dell from SAMS (Scottish Association for Marine Science)
Dr Alex Thompson from Seawilding.
Thanks to our MARD cohort and participants: Charline Lallane, Lesley Roberts, Quoi Alexander, Ines Quinones Fabregas, Tom Longmate, Lucy Mitchell, James Harlow, Sami Kimberley and Gabriella Rhodes
Link to Eventbrite for booking click here
All work will be shared on the EcosystemAlliance.earth website
Our first activation took place in Argyll and Bute, Scotland, where disciplines intersected, assumptions were challenged, and work was grounded in place, urgency, and local knowledge. In partnership with the Kilchoan Melfort Trust and in connection with the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), our group carried out hands-on activities to explore and evolve how biodiversity restoration can be practiced. Working with biodiversity requires new modes of interdisciplinary collaboration to understand ecosystem interactions, relations and impact.
Working with ecosystems requires us to work holistically and put the relational whole as the centre of practice. By joining ecology and design, we aim to build new languages that evolve eco-social learning for regenerative design practices and build a transnational learning collective by bringing students from different part of the world to Scotland and integrate regenerative collaborations between discipline and perspectives with local knowledge partners in Scotland.
The aim of the Ecosystem Alliance is to develop new empirical biodiversity methods to enable collaboration between ecologists, designers and local communities. The Ecosystem Alliance will work in the ecotone where land, water and communities meet. Designing for biodiversity restoration is not just a puzzle to be solved but a quest for restoring new relational capacities in understanding how we are collectively dependent on the diversity of life.
In this first project we focus on developing new vocabularies, construct new interdisciplinary methodologies, interventions and fieldwork, through hands-on learning and the navigating ‘being’ ecosystems. The Ecosystem Alliance works and learn from with local experts and weave together a connected network that will inform, experiment and support the collective aim of biodiversity restoration as ecological and social practice.
MARD was honoured to receive the LVMH Maison/0 Challenge ‘Biodiversity’ Fund to support this long-term project. Through Ecosystem Alliance, we explored how collaborative approaches can unlock the potential of biodiversity restoration, demonstrating that this challenge requires new methodologies and an evolution in design practice rather than a single solution. The week’s work laid the foundation for future collaborations and insights. Stay tuned for our presentation on 19 November, where we will share our findings, reflections, and next steps in building effective biodiversity alliances.