Songs of the Mangroves¹

La espalda a mí me duele / My back hurts
Ay, de tanto yo piangüar / Oh, from so much piangua digging
Ya no quiero sacar piangua / I don’t want to dig anymore
Lo que quiero es conservar / What I want is to conserve
Y si a mí no me jubila / And if I don’t get to retire
Yo no sé qué irá a pasar / I don’t know what’s going to happen
La conservación existe / Conservation exists
Las parcelas en lo’ manglar / The plots among the mangroves

These plaintive lines echoed in time with the oars that carried our canoe across the calm waters of the Colombian Pacific at low tide. Just past six in the morning, a twilight murk still veiled the brilliant hues of one of the world’s most exuberant biomes. The morning’s repose was broken only by the soft splash of paddles cutting through the gray shallows and the melancholy song of Aura Nelly Díaz, head of the Bahía Málaga community piangüeras association. Her daughter-in-law, Rosa Angulo, hummed a tune of her own as we drifted tranquilly toward a thicket of mangroves.

We had just set out from La Plata, one of four small Afro-Colombian settlements in Bahía Málaga. This coastal inlet, several hours by speedboat from the bustling port city of Buenaventura, is legally designated the Uramba Bahía Málaga National Natural Park. A decentralized community governance structure manages the small-scale tourism that contributes to the bay’s largely circular economy. Thousands of tourists flock here each year, many hoping to glimpse the humpback whales that annually migrate from their feeding grounds near the poles to their breeding grounds in these warm equatorial waters. Natural scientists such as marine biologists and ecologists are also frequent visitors, while social scientists like me are drawn in by the unique socioecological traditions of the malagueños, the folk of the bay.

The Afro-Colombians of the Pacific coast are an amphibious people,² their lives and livelihoods entwined with the sea and its bountiful produce—a way of life that endured despite their enslavement from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This aquatic intimacy traces back to West African coastal and riverine communities from which many enslaved people were taken. Their relationship with water mirrors that of the region’s Indigenous Emberá and Wounaan peoples, for whom rivers and estuaries have long been arteries of life, suggesting a remarkable convergence of socioecological practices across distinct cultural traditions—a local instantiation of a broader pattern of Afro-Indigenous cultural exchange³ throughout Latin America.

Early each morning, taking advantage of the low tide, women like Aura Nelly and Rosa paddle canoes deep into the coastal mangrove forests of the Colombian Pacific, wading through thick mud and tangled roots in search of the coveted piangua—an endemic ark clam species (Anadara tuberculosa) and a cornerstone of the local diet.⁴ These women, called piangüeras, work in teams and sing as they gather up the mollusks they will later sell or prepare for their families. Boiled, cleaned, and shelled, piangua is the nutritional centerpiece of a wide variety of traditional meals, from the famous ceviche to lesser-known staples like encocado, sudado, and cazuela.⁵

The songs of Bahía Málaga reflect the rhythms and concerns of everyday life in the Afro-Colombian Pacific. Many carry a didactic tone, teaching listeners the importance of conservation or the proper techniques for harvesting piangua sustainably. From a cultural perspective, these songs valorize the customs and beliefs they reference. From a cognitive perspective, they may also act as efficient mnemonic devices, aiding in the recall of important information by embedding it in structures of repetition, rhythm, and melody. As anthropologists have documented in other cases, songs can operate as a form of environmental folklore,⁶ storing and transmitting ecological knowledge and ethical guidelines.

More broadly, these songs, like the traditions they refer to—not only the clam-harvesting art of piangüar but also traditional agroforestry systems,⁷ foodways, economic patterns,⁸ kinship structures, oral literature,⁹ religious life,¹⁰ and so on—form part of this region’s distinctive biocultural heritage, an adaptive socioecological system that keeps the balance between human communities and the ecosystems they coexist with.

Anthropologists invoke “biocultural heritage”¹¹ to refer to the complex entanglements between biological and cultural diversity. This term encompasses the ecosystems, knowledge systems, livelihoods, and cultural practices that communities and environments shape together as they coevolve. This concept challenges older distinctions between cultural heritage (with tangible and intangible expressions) and natural heritage. Instead of treating these categories as separate, the biocultural perspective foregrounds the relationships through which communities and ecosystems are mutually constituted and sustained across generations.

The stakes of this conceptual shift are high. A growing body of research demonstrates that the world’s remaining biodiversity hotspots overlap with the territories of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, and that the erosion of traditional ecological knowledge tends to accelerate ecosystem degradation.¹² To protect one, in other words, is to protect the other. The Pacific coast of Colombia, one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to Afro-descendant communities deeply rooted in its ecosystems, offers a compelling case for taking biocultural heritage seriously as a framework for research, governance, and conservation.¹³

With equal skill and grace, Aura Nelly landed the canoe on a gravely beach adjacent to a dense patch of mangroves, one of many that blanket the islets dotted throughout Bahía Málaga. Whereas the piangüeras know this archipelago like the back of their hand and can readily distinguish one stand of trees from another, my untrained eye registered little difference between any two muddy tangles of aerial roots. Yet there are seven distinct mangrove species in the Colombian Pacific. An additional two species are found on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, for a total of nine throughout the country. Six are found in Bahía Málaga, making it one of the most biodiverse zones of Colombia’s extensive network of mangrove forests.

“Most of our mangrove forests are in the Pacific coast,” says marine biologist Ernesto Mancera, one of Colombia’s foremost experts on mangroves. “Eighty percent of the mangrove forests that we have in Colombia are in the Pacific. In the Caribbean, we have the other twenty percent, mainly in the Ciénaga Grande and also in Urabá.” Mancera’s work on mangroves and coastal ecosystems in the Colombian Pacific, as well as the Caribbean, has demonstrated the efficacy and importance of nature-based solutions for addressing ecological challenges in complex socioecological environments.

Explore the full InterDialogue with Ernesto Mancera.

Read his InterArticle on the role of assertive communication in the effectiveness and sustainability of nature-based solutions.

Mangroves are keystones in coastal ecosystems. They provide physical infrastructure for countless other species of flora and fauna, anchor shorelines with their roots, cycle nutrients, filter pollutants, and sequester carbon. And, crucially for local communities, bivalves like piangua and other species thrive¹⁴ in the intertidal zone at the mangroves’ muddy roots, which provide a safe sanctuary for shellfish to spawn and mature. Or, as recounted more poetically in another one of Aura Nelly’s songs:

La piangua viene de afuera / The piangua comes from outside
¿De dónde viene la piangua? / Where does the piangua come from?
La piangua viene de afuera / The piangua comes from outside
Ella viene a los esteros / She comes to the marshes
Ella viene a desovar / She comes to spawn
Ella viene a los esteros / She comes to the marshes
A dejar su cría en lo’ manglar / To leave her young in the mangroves
A dejar su cría en lo’ manglar / To leave her young in the mangroves
Y si amanece lloviendo, nos dificulta salir / And if it’s raining at dawn, it’s hard for us to go out
Por buscar nuestro alimento nos toca salir así / But to find our food, we have to go out like this
A buscar la piangua en el manglar / To look for the piangua in the mangroves
A buscar la piangua en el manglar / To look for the piangua in the mangroves

Leaving the canoe on the beach, we wrestled our way into the mangrove thicket and found ourselves under its dim and humid canopy, our tall rubber boots squelching with every step. Though twice my age, Aura Nelly spryly ducked and dodged her way through the maze of roots with evident ease. Rosa was just as nimble, while I trailed behind both in clumsier fashion. 

At last we came to the edge of the mangrove forest, where the mud and roots merge indistinctly with the gentle lapping waves of the great Pacific Ocean. The bay’s geography buffers its islets from the forceful oceanic tides that batter much of Colombia’s wild Pacific coast—one reason, perhaps, why many communities have preferred to settle on higher ground, in coastal inlets like Bahía Málaga, or along the many rivers flowing down from the western arm of the Colombian Andes, rather than directly on the coast itself.

Such precautions are prudent. In late 2025, the nearby town of Juanchaco was hit by dangerously high tides, locally called puja, that destroyed numerous homes, flooded the town’s streets, and eroded stretches of coastline. Global sea level rise only exacerbates¹⁵ the vulnerability of coastal communities already facing an array of local environmental issues both on land and at sea. 

“In the past, the tide didn’t reach as far as it does today,” said José Daniel Mosquera, the young legal representative of Ecomanglar, Bahía Málaga’s community tourism association. “The beaches and islands are eroding, and the erosion is getting worse. Roots that used to be buried deep in the ground are now coming to the surface. That’s a result of the erosion that’s taking place. These climatic changes are very significant, very noticeable.”

Environmental pressures such as illegal logging, wildlife smuggling,¹⁶ coca cultivation,¹⁷ and gold mining¹⁸—with downstream effects including deforestation, biodiversity loss,¹⁹ coastal erosion,²⁰ and heavy metal contamination²¹—pose constant threats to life in the Colombian Pacific. Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by these operations, which are largely controlled by armed groups implicated in Colombia’s long-running internal conflict.

Agroindustry businesses in the private sector, such as palm oil plantations and cattle ranches, are also responsible for deforestation and community displacement. Despite their nominal legality, these businesses often employ paramilitary groups as muscle. Similar processes drive social and ecological problems in other endangered Colombian wetlands.

Colombian land system scientist Paulo Murillo uses datasets derived from high-resolution remote sensing to monitor mangrove ecosystems²² and other environments in relation to human activities, including illegal activities like coca cultivation, logging, and mining. Murillo stresses the importance of collaborating with local communities²³ in this work. “In these locations,” he says, “the role of communities has been very important. They know pretty well all the benefits that they receive from nature, from forests, from mangroves, from the ocean.”

Explore the full InterDialogue with Paulo Murillo.

Read his InterArticle on the social life of the pixel in land system science.

Marine ecosystems are also suffering. Piangüeras and other artisanal fisherfolk increasingly compete with commercial fishers over dwindling stocks of marine resources. Whereas the artisanal methods of the piangüeras are sustainable, commercial operations harvest animals under the legal weight and size thresholds. Mollusks must reach sexual maturity before they can reproduce;²⁴ harvesting a piangua before it has had the chance to spawn removes not just one animal from the ecosystem, but all of its potential offspring as well. Population decline may also risk disrupting the broader ecosystems and food webs in which mollusks play a key ecological role.²⁵

Commercial operators compound this harm by selling their catch at lower prices than piangüeras can afford to offer, undercutting the local economy. Much of this catch is shipped to Ecuador, where lower legal size thresholds create an incentive to harvest undersized mollusks in Colombia and export them across the border, implicating international trade in the overexploitation of marine resources in the Colombian Pacific.

Yet here among the mangroves, knee-deep in mud, the tradition lives despite the challenges. Donning long yellow rubber gloves and now crooning yet another song, Aura Nelly dove into the sediment at the base of the mangroves, moving from one root cluster to the next with the efficient skill of one who has spent her life learning to read her complex environment. Even so, the work is physically demanding and slow-going. Several minutes passed before Aura Nelly found the first suitable piangua and dropped it into the wickerwork basket she hoped to fill.

The piangüeras measure each specimen against a pianguimetro, a special scale designed by coastal communities in collaboration with academic, governmental, and nonprofit organizations.²⁶ Small clams (typically <5 cm) yet to mature and breed are returned, while larger ones (>5 cm) past reproductive age are harvested. As usual, Aura Nelly has another apt song at the ready:

Ya el agua se está secando, vámonos pa’l manglar / The water is receding now, let’s head to the mangroves
¿Y dónde será la piangua? En la raíz del manglar / And where might the piangua be? At the roots of the mangrove
¿Cómo hacen pa’ sacarla? Meté la mano sacá de allá / How do you catch it? Reach in and pull it out from there

Nosotros hacemos la veda cuando vamos al manglar / We practice selective fishing when we go to the mangroves
Sacamos la piangua grande, y la pequeña queda allá / We catch the big piangua, and the little one stays there
Meté la mano sacá de allá / Reach in and pull it out from there
El pejesapo te va a picar / The angler is going to bite you
La piangua pequeña dejala allá / Leave the little piangua there
La marea, la marea, la marea va a subir / The tide, the tide, the tide is going to come in
Yo cojo mi canasto y me voy de aquí / I’ll grab my basket and get out of here
Meté la mano sacá de allá / Reach in and pull it out from there
El pejesapo te va a picar / The angler is going to bite you
Metéla ahí quitá de allá / Reach in there, pull it out from there
Y la piangua pequeña déjala allá / And leave the little piangua there

The conservationist ethos expressed by such songs has not always been so apparent. In decades past, the communities of Bahía Málaga harvested piangua at unsustainable rates.²⁷ Populations remain under pressure, as indicated by reductions in genetic diversity²⁸ among several coastal populations. However, community-led conservation strategies—closed harvesting seasons, community monitoring, rotation of extraction areas, and enforcement of minimum size thresholds—have shown measurable positive effects, repositioning local harvesters as cautious stewards rather than careless extractors. Still, the work remains slow and often thankless.

The piangua basket was not yet half full when we returned to the canoe two hours later. Yields are not what they once were—and the consequent strain on local livelihoods is one reason why local communities have increasingly turned toward tourism²⁹ as a profitable complement to the work itself. Whether this represents an adaptive form of preserving biocultural heritage or a subtle expression of its erosion is an open question. Yet Aura Nelly stands by the need to maintain the tradition to conserve both culture and ecology, regardless of who watches her work.

“Piangüar is transmitted from generation to generation,” Aura Nelly told me later, swinging from a colorful hammock on the porch of her house, which overlooks the bay. “My grandmother taught my mother, and my mother taught me, and I taught my children, and I continue teaching my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren, my nieces and nephews, my cousins—everyone born in this territory.”

Biocultural Landscapes

Though today the celebrated piangua is the virtual mascot of Afro-Colombian biocultural heritage, it represents just one thread in a complex tapestry. No less central to lifeways and livelihoods in places like Bahía Málaga are the traditional agricultural systems³⁰ of the Afro-Pacific, which traditionally contribute the bulk of local communities’ nutritional and medicinal needs. Taken together, these interwoven practices—maritime and agricultural, coastal and terrestrial—reveal that these communities’ biocultural heritage is not reducible to any single tradition or ecosystem but extends to the whole of their territories.

For many families in the Afro-Pacific, home gardens and agroforestry plots remain a primary site of food sovereignty, economic production and exchange, and traditional ecological knowledge. These systems resemble the “food forests” of many other Afro-descendent and Indigenous communities throughout Colombia and elsewhere in tropical Latin America. Beyond food and medicine, agroforestry plots also yield animal feed, fuel, timber, and raw materials for artisanal products such as musical instruments.

Listen to Colombian physicist Rafael Hurtado discuss the complexity of traditional marimba music.

Explore the full InterDialogue with Rafael Hurtado.

These fine-tuned socioecological systems distill generations of observation, experimentation, and knowledge transmission. By striking a balance between ecological conditions, population needs, and economic opportunities, they constitute an elegant alternative to the extractive, monoculture-driven model of industrial agrobusiness, which has deforested huge swaths of rainforest in the interest of short-term returns.

Research confirms the impressive agrobiodiversity of Afro-Colombian gardens, though the Pacific coast remains understudied relative to other regions. One study in the area of Nuquí³¹ documented 64 useful plant species across 31 families within traditional production systems. That figure may be an undercount of the total, given that a study in the nearby community of Joví³² identified 79 species across 37 families of medicinal plants alone.

The data is even clearer in the better-studied Afro-Colombian communities of other regions. In the nearby inland region of northern Cauca—today mostly blanketed with vast expanses of monoculture sugarcane fields, with disastrous consequences for local ecologies and livelihoods—another study documented at least 128 plant species in remaining Afro-Colombian smallholdings. The numbers are even higher among Afro-Colombian farms in northern Colombia, where researchers from Colombia’s Humboldt Institute identified 272 plant species and 151 insect species.

A recent review published in Nature³³ quantifying Afro-descendent communities’ contributions to biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation across South America found that in Colombia nearly 92% of formally recognized Afro-Colombian lands are in the top 5% most biodiverse areas. This figure testifies not only to the efficacy of Afro-Colombian land use practices but also to the importance of legal recognitions and protections of their territorial rights and autonomy. The causal relationship between culture and conservation has long been understood with respect to Latin America’s Indigenous communities. The evidence suggests that it is time to likewise recognize Afro-descendant communities’ vital role as land stewards.

Explore the full InterDialogue with Brandon Barker.

Yet for all the ecological, cultural, and economic importance of local agroforestry practices, a confluence of factors has threatened these systems in recent years. Across the Afro-Pacific, problems like deforestation, erosion, soil depletion, the advent of the cash economy, and displacement have led some communities to increasingly abandon³⁴ their traditions.

Fortunately, in Bahía Málaga a dense web of partnerships—between community organizations, universities, nonprofits, and state bodies—has helped safeguard the community’s biocultural heritage, agroforestry traditions included. These collaborations date back to between 2004 and 2006, when Colombia’s Marine and Coastal Research Institute (INVEMAR), the Universidad del Valle, and the Institute for Research and Preservation of the Cultural and Natural Heritage of Valle del Cauca (INCIVA) conducted a multi-year biodiversity assessment. This collaboration contributed to the bay’s 2010 declaration as a national park—one designed to function alongside, not supersede, the territorial governance mechanisms of surrounding Afro-Colombian communities.

That initial alliance has since only deepened and diversified. Ecomanglar is an emblematic case, drawing support from universities (the Universidad de los Andes, the Universidad del Valle, and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana), conservation groups (Conservation International, WWF Colombia), and government and multilateral bodies (SENA, the UNDP), according to the organization’s website. These initiatives form a layered ecosystem of collaboration: scientific research that justifies legal protection; legal protection that creates space for community-led governance; and community-led governance that, in turn, attracts the institutional partnerships needed to sustain it.

The malagueños, in collaboration with diverse allies, have shown that averting processes of biocultural erosion is possible. However, most other Afro-Colombian communities lack the auspicious circumstances that have made Bahía Málaga a success story. Can Bahía Málaga serve as an example for territories where those destructive processes continue apace?

Governing the Commons

One warm and drizzly night, over a bottle of viche—the ubiquitous artisanal liquor of the Afro-Pacific—José told me the history of the Community Council of the Black Communities of La Plata–Bahía Málaga, the region’s legally constituted autonomous government. Understanding this entity is key to appreciating Bahía Málaga as a unique case in the community-led, collaborative management of biocultural heritage in the Afro-Pacific.

The community council derives its legal authority from Transitory Article 55 of Colombia’s 1991 Constitution, Law 70 of 1993, and Decree 1745 of 1995, which created the legal framework for the official recognition, collective titling,³⁵ and self-governance of Afro-Colombian communities. These autonomous governance structures are now widespread throughout Colombia.

“The community council,” José told me, “comes together in one place to hold an assembly, which makes decisions about the actions needed for the wellbeing of the territory and the community. The community council has also established productive organizations such as the Fishermen’s Association, the Loggers’ Association, the Market Women’s Association, and other associations, as well as Ecomanglar.”

Ecomanglar was founded in 2008 as an initiative in sustainable community-led tourism³⁶ with both ecological and ethnic dimensions. It is also responsible for facilitating access to scientists, nonprofits, and officials. Ecomanglar follows a profit-sharing model³⁷ in which, in theory, the whole community benefits from its tourism operations. Each activity implicates people involved in various sectors of the local economy: boat motorists, piangüeras, musicians, merchants, cooks, hospitality workers, farmers, and others.

“Today, Ecomanglar is the star of our community,” Aura Nelly told me later, “helping us share the benefits step by step, rotating them among everyone in the community. That’s why one person handles one aspect while someone else handles another. Everyone contributes their knowledge and plays the role they’re best suited for.” I observed this principle in practice when Aura Nelly delivered our hard-won pianguas to the chef at the Ecomanglar restaurant in La Plata, to which we returned several hours later for a delicious ceviche lunch.

This model has clearly benefitted Bahía Málaga, a prosperous place by local standards. Yet the community has been careful not to allow tourism to take over, imposing limits on the number of visitors brought into the bay. “We decided that the community should not stop its daily activities to focus on tourism,” explained José, “but rather that tourism should complement our community.”

This principled position recognizes controlled tourism³⁸ as a valuable source of economic, cultural, and ecological benefit that can nonetheless be taken too far. It thus presents a striking alternative to the overtourism and associated social and environmental problems that result when profitability is prioritized over sustainability. It demonstrates the capacity of decentralized governance structures to balance economic opportunity with the responsible stewardship of biocultural heritage. Indeed, Bahía Málaga may stand as a leading example of biocultural tourism³⁹ done well.

The same principles of effective governance⁴⁰ characterize the community’s approach to resource extraction, land use, collective decision-making, conservation, and economic development. In the case of mangroves,⁴¹ for example, the council has identified regeneration zones where overexploited mangrove stands are left to recover; implemented restoration programs to reintroduce mangroves in areas of deforestation or die-offs; and led community monitoring efforts to collect data and ensure compliance with conservation mandates. These and other programs are carried out in collaboration with environmental authorities, universities, nonprofits, and state agencies. Studies have found that such joint collaborations are one of the most effective forms of managing and conserving mangrove forests in areas otherwise characterized by ecosystem decline.⁴² 

In this respect, Bahía Málaga offers an illuminating case study in the governance of common-pool resources. Rather than succumbing to a “tragedy of the commons,” local communities have developed robust institutions that enable the sustainable management of shared resources. Their experience appears to confirm many of the principles outlined by political economist Elinor Ostrom, whose Nobel Prize-winning research demonstrated that communities can devise effective systems⁴³ for governing common-pool resources without relying on privatization or centralized state control. Similar principles undergird current attempts to model and develop a circular bioeconomy for the Amazon, largely based on Indigenous traditions.

Explore the full InterDialogue with Mariana Gómez Soto.

On one level, such successes may not have been possible without top-down measures like the legislation that underpins local governance structures.⁴⁴ But viewed from another angle, the governance institutions of Bahía Málaga emerged from a broader history of sociopolitical mobilization and grassroots organizing that have long characterized Afro-Colombian territorial rights activism. The community council system,l itself is a product of the Afro-Colombian rights movement⁴⁵ of the 1980s and 1990s—coinciding with similar struggles among Colombia’s Indigenous peoples, which yielded similarly productive legislative outcomes.

The upshot is that in places like Bahía Málaga, conservation work is inseparable from the broader Afro-Colombian project of territorial autonomy.⁴⁶ For local communities, to defend mangroves, conserve pianguas, cultivate food forests, use medicinal plants, sing folk songs, cook traditional meals, and so on, is to valorize and uphold the integral biocultural fabric of the Afro-Pacific in all its dimensions. The state and other outside actors, for their part, must equitably partner with stakeholder communities, as they have in Bahía Málaga, if they hope to effectively materialize their conservation and development goals on the local level.

The upshot is that in places like Bahía Málaga, conservation work is inseparable from the broader Afro-Colombian project of territorial autonomy. For local communities, to defend mangroves, conserve pianguas, cultivate food forests, use medicinal plants, sing folk songs, cook traditional meals, and so on, is to valorize and uphold the integral biocultural fabric of the Afro-Pacific in all its dimensions. The state and other outside actors, for their part, must equitably partner with stakeholder communities, as they have in Bahía Málaga, if they hope to effectively materialize their conservation and development goals on the local level.

Despite the environmental and economic challenges faced by the people of Bahía Málaga, this small bay is undoubtedly a success story in the context of Colombia’s Pacific coast, a region historically marked by poverty,⁴⁷ ineffective governance, and state neglect. The relative cultural vitality, economic prosperity, and ecological integrity on display in Bahía Málaga may be attributed to the effective synergy of local communities’ biocultural heritage, their decentralized community governance model that values sustainability over unfettered profit, and their sustained collaborations with allied scientists, nonprofits, and government agencies who offer their services without imposing demands.

Beyond the mangrove-covered islets of Bahía Málaga, this case illustrates more broadly how the careful integration of biocultural heritage systems with scientific research, sound policy, and autonomous structures of governance benefits all stakeholders—not just local communities but also scientists, tourists, and an enormous diversity of nonhuman species. Where communities have access to the collaborations and resources needed to steward the ecosystems they coevolved with, both tend to flourish.

Banner image: Aura Nelly Díaz, head of the Bahía Málaga community piangüeras association, sings as she works. Credit: Rowan Glass.

1. Some of the songs referenced in this article are available in the Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive: https://fieldwork-archive.com/colombia. All recordings courtesy of Rowan Glass. ↩︎
2. Oslender, Ulrich. 2004. “Fleshing Out the Geographies of Social Movements: Colombia’s Pacific Coast Black Communities and the ‘Aquatic Space.’” Political Geography 23 (8): 957–85. ↩︎
3. Wade, Peter. 2018. “Afro-Indigenous Interactions, Relations, and Comparisons.” In Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews, 92–129. Cambridge University Press.
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4. The closely related but less common species Anadara similis is also present in Bahía Málaga and is likewise known as piangua. Local communities distinguish between A. tuberculosa as piangua hembra (“female piangua”) and A. similis as piangua macho (“male piangua”). ↩︎
5. Prehistoric shell middens (concheros) found in coastal archaeological sites attest to the antiquity of shellfish exploitation as a mainstay of human subsistence strategies in the Colombian Pacific. As has frequently occurred throughout the colonial and postcolonial Americas, in this region Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities have mutually benefitted from the longstanding exchange of cultural and ecological knowledge. ↩︎
6. Fernández-Llamazares, Álvaro, and Dana Lepofsky. 2019. “Ethnobiology through Song.” Journal of Ethnobiology 39 (3): 337–53. ↩︎
7. Quintero-Ángel, Mauricio, Andrés Quintero-Ángel, Diana M. Mendoza-Salazar, and Sebastian Orjuela-Salazar. 2021. “Traditional Landscape Appropriation of Afro-Descendants and Collective Titling in the Colombian Pacific Region: Lessons for Transformative Change.” In Fostering Transformative Change for Sustainability in the Context of Socio-Ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS), edited by Maiko Nishi et al. Springer. ↩︎
8. Cornier, Caroline. 2026. “Ethnic Land Rights as a Faustian Bargain? On the Afro-Colombian Struggle for Alternative Livelihoods and Its Limits.” Progress in Development Studies 26 (1): 7–26. ↩︎
9. Oslender, Ulrich. 2007. “Re-Visiting the Hidden Transcript: Oral Tradition and Black Cultural Politics in the Colombian Pacific Coast Region.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (6): 1103–29. ↩︎
10. Manrique, Carlos A. 2024. “Insubordinate Black Catholicism, Ethnization, and Social Ontologies in Colombia’s Pacific Region.” American Religion 5 (2): 81–104. ↩︎
11. Maffi, Luisa, ed. 2001. On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment. Smithsonian Institution Press. ↩︎
12. Sinthumule, Ndidzulafhi I. 2023. “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and its Role in Biodiversity Conservation: A Systematic Review.” Frontiers in Environmental Science 11: 1164900.
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13.  Lindholm, Karl-Johan, and Anneli Ekblom. 2019. “A Framework for Exploring and Managing Biocultural Heritage.” Anthropocene 25: 100195. ↩︎
14. Nagelkerken, I., S. J. M. Blaber, S. Bouillon, P. Green, M. Haywood, L. G. Kirton, J.-O. Meynecke, J. Pawlik, H. M. Penrose, A. Sasekumar, and P. J. Somerfield. 2008. “The Habitat Function of Mangroves for Terrestrial and Marine (In)vertebrate Fauna: A Review.” Aquatic Botany 89 (2): 155–85. ↩︎
15. Nevermann, Hannes, Jorge Nicolas Becerra Gomez, Peter Fröhle, and Nima Shokri. 2023. “Land Loss Implications of Sea Level Rise along the Coastline of Colombia under Different Climate Change Scenarios.” Climate Risk Management 39: 100470. ↩︎
16. Asprilla Perea, Jeferson, Jorge Eliecer Serna Agudelo, and Yacira Palacios Asprilla. 2013. “Diagnóstico sobre el Decomiso de Fauna Silvestre en el Departamento del Chocó (Pacífico Norte Colombiano).” Revista U.D.C.A Actualidad & Divulgación Científica 16 (1): 175–84. ↩︎
17. Rincón-Ruiz, Alexander, Hyarold Leonardo Correa, Daniel Oswaldo León, and Stewart Williams. 2016. “Coca Cultivation and Crop Eradication in Colombia: The Challenges of Integrating Rural Reality into Effective Anti-Drug Policy.” International Journal of Drug Policy 33: 56–65. ↩︎
18. Tubb, Daniel. 2015. “Muddy Decisions: Gold in the Chocó, Colombia.” The Extractive Industries and Society 2 (4): 722–33. ↩︎
19. Meyer, Victoria, Sassan Saatchi, António Ferraz, et al. 2019. “Forest Degradation and Biomass Loss along the Chocó Region of Colombia.” Carbon Balance and Management 14 (1): 2. ↩︎
20. Correa, Ivan D., and Juan Luis Gonzalez. 2000. “Coastal Erosion and Village Relocation: A Colombian Case Study.” Ocean & Coastal Management 43 (1): 51–64. ↩︎
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