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Transdisciplinary collaboration offers great potential for meaningfully addressing complex problems related to climate change and social inequities. Communication shapes transdisciplinary collaboration in myriad ways, and interdisciplinary and rhetorical approaches to communication can help identify these influences as well as strategies to transform inequitable communication patterns. In this paper, we share results from an engaged and ethnographic research project focused on strategic communication in a large-scale transdisciplinary collaboration to develop environmental-DNA (eDNA) science for coastal resilience. In this context, definitions of eDNA, perspectives about communication, and constructions of audience and expertise shape the ways in which collaborators co-produce knowledge across disciplines and with diverse partners. Identifying relationships among strategic communication, knowledge co-production, and power enables the development of strategic collaborative practices, including asking questions as a means to identify and negotiate differences in definitions of eDNA and using participatory methods and anti-oppressive data management platforms for ethical praxis. 

Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as “natural,” “intact,” and “wild” generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis.