Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Measuring Impacts of Community Seed Banks on Nutrition, Food Security, and Food Sovereignty in Underserved Regions

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Law and Science program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Alder Keleman Saxena at Northern Arizona University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the interlinking issues of nutritional security, hunger reduction, and sustainable agriculture. As the United States experiences increasing environmental changes (e.g., heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and flooding) on local access to nutritional foods is fundamental.

Food crops that evolve and adapt are central to securing food access in rapidly changing environments. This project undertakes these interrelated issues, examining the ways in which locally-based community seed banks are protecting crop diversity while increasing local access to nutritional, healthy foods. Community seed banks can serve as central nodes that 1) connect people to food resources, 2) steward the environment, and 3) preserve and grow important regional food crops.

Despite their importance in these roles, there is little to no research on how they actually serve impacted communities. This undertaking fills this gap, examining community seed banks in areas of high poverty and hunger, to trace the pathways from seed banks to food access and nutrition. The project will contribute original data on these pathways, illustrating where, how, when, and who benefits from local seed banks.

The research objective of this undertaking is to identify existing agrobiodiversity conservation initiatives in most impacted regions of the US, linking them to how they facilitate community networks for the goal of providing and increasing access to food and nutritional security. This project undertakes a four-part research design, including network analysis and pathway mapping to determine the flow of seeds to and away from community seed banks, identifying the various actors involved, their levels of participation, and outcomes of seed and benefit sharing to the community.

Additionally, it will identify a typology of seed-to-food pathways, which could include backyard garden projects, community gardens, community supported- agriculture, free community fridges, educational spaces, school gardens, and others. Community members and community seed bank organizers in each case site area will be interviewed, with all interviews coded and housed in qualitative data coding software.

Finally, focus groups will be held in each identified case site to assess perceptions of community seed banks and their pathways, along with how communities themselves identify these pathways. This research will contribute 1) methods for examining the conditions under which CSBs support food security/nutrition through expanding access to agrobiodiversity; 2) multiple data sets, including indexes of locally and regionally conserved seed varieties, ecosystems in which they are used, and how communities use them; and 3) network analyses introducing a typology of actors and institutions that support the flow of agrobiodiversity to and from communities.

Broadly, this postdoctoral project directly contributes to global calls for increasing research on the status of agrobiodiversity. Furthermore, it contributes to understanding the intersections of sustainable food systems with food security/access/and nutrition. This research emphasizes the ways in which human societies interact and engage with their physical environments, with potential to shape theories on environmental governance and food policy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.