Pacha Nishi

Throughout history, human societies have cultivated sophisticated relationships with their environments. These relationships are built on collective understandings of how plants are selected for specific uses and how they are managed. Together, these understandings form a body of knowledge, passed down over generations, that guides sustainable harvest and adaptation to environmental change. This extensive ecological knowledge is invaluable for the sustainable management of natural resources and for the continuation of the traditional knowledge, beliefs, and practices associated with them. The Shipibo-Konibo of the Ucayali region of Peru have long stewarded the ecosystems of the Amazon rainforest. Yet their ecological knowledge and ways of being are threatened by deforestation, logging, land-use change, cultural assimilation, and language loss. These forces make the future of their beliefs, cultural practices, ecosystem knowledge, and resource management uncertain.

In collaboration with Shipibo-Konibo communities, The Coe Lab works to weave local ecological knowledge together with scientific knowledge. This approach is known as woven science, or Two-Eyed Seeing, a concept introduced by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall. We support restoration projects that safeguard sacred medicines for future generations, while fostering the continuation of local knowledge through education, cultural exchange, and economic opportunities. The Pacha Nishi Project, a restoration and conservation genetics field station on Shipibo-Konibo land, is one such collaboration, working to ensure that Shipibo-Konibo knowledge of plants and ecosystem management endures. By combining Shipibo-Konibo plant knowledge with the principles of modern ecology, the project aims to provide actionable solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing plant medicine communities and cultural practices in the Amazon basin, including sustainable ayahuasca harvest and production.

As ayahuasca use spreads beyond its ancestral home in the Amazon basin, growing demand for its source plants has led to reported shortages in Amazonian cities and raised concerns about sustainability. Our research shows that heavy harvest reduces the survival of large vines, and that clonal regrowth alone cannot prevent population decline. The same forces that threaten Shipibo-Konibo knowledge, from deforestation to land-use change, also threaten the ecosystems and web of life on which ayahuasca source plants depend. Together, these pressures challenge the long-term persistence of ayahuasca use and the cultural traditions associated with it. Pacha Nishi collaborators are therefore developing a pioneering woven-science framework to guide the sustainable management of ayahuasca plant populations, while ensuring ayahuasca production as a locally grown, sustainably sourced medicine.

This work is already taking root. Together with our Shipibo-Konibo partners, we are restoring more than twenty hectares of degraded Amazonian land through regenerative agroforestry built around ayahuasca and its companion species. Two experimental plots, planted along drought and flooding gradients, now hold roughly 350 lianas across four locally recognized ayahuasca varieties (Cielo, Dulce, Negra, and Sacha), along with more than 500 companion trees. These plantings anchor a five-year demographic study of how ayahuasca populations respond to harvest and environmental change. They also support conservation genetics research asking whether clonal reproduction maintains genetic diversity under harvest, and whether the four varieties are genetically distinct. These questions are critical because much of the ayahuasca planted today is grown from cuttings, so a field of thriving vines may hold only a handful of genetically distinct individuals, all equally vulnerable to the same drought, flooding, disease, or pest. Knowing how much diversity remains, and where it lies, will guide which lineages to protect and propagate so that the medicine endures for future generations