Biodiversity change directly threatens the livelihoods, food security, and cultural and ecological integrity of rural subsistence-oriented households across the developing world. People will be forced to respond to it in ways that either mitigate loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services or that exacerbate losses. An unprecedented extinction of species is underway, and climate change is affecting species' range and phenology, leading to new species configurations that affect ecosystem services in unpredictable ways. With climate change and continued habitat alteration entailed in human population growth, 'novel' ecosystems will become even more prevalent. In the UN International Year of Biodiversity, scientists and policy makers must recognise that humans, biodiversity, and ecosystems must co-evolve and co-adapt. However, Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change is not considered as theme in any international, regional, or national science or policy forums. There is a dearth of scientific research about HABC, so scientists and policy makers lack mandates, conceptual frameworks, knowledge, and tools to project or predict human responses and their actual or potential outcomes, synergies, and feedbacks. Indeed, 'A significant new research effort is required to encourage decision makers to consider biodiversity, climate change and human livelihoods together' (Royal Society 2007). At the same time, there is a call for a 'paradigm shift' in adaptation thinking away from top-down planning and toward supporting local adaptation. Local adaptation efforts go unnoticed, uncoordinated, and unaided by outsiders and, unless policy makers become aware of the importance and extent of autonomous adaptation processes and understand what influences their outcomes, adaptation and mitigation policies may be ineffective or counter-productive. This project's aim is to kickstart the development of appropriate conceptual frameworks, methods and integrated models for understanding human adaptation to change in biodiversity and related ecosystem services that can eventually be used to predict outcomes for biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being in highly biodiversity dependent societies, and provide evidence for the utility of these outputs to a new network of researchers and policy makers. The building blocks for development of concepts, methods, tools and models are a) local information or knowledge systems and monitoring capacity, b) local valuation of biodiversity and related ecosystem services; c) integrating biological resources and ecosystem services into an understanding of livelihood processes, d) assessing perceptions, risks, needs, and ability to respond, and e) understanding biological and welfare outcomes and feedbacks. The project joins partners from anthropology, economics and ecology/biology at Oxford, Kent and SOAS, with partners from South Africa and India. Partners will jointly elaborate the conceptual framework in a first intensive workshop using a scenario building protocol. Then, teams incrementally develop and evaluate research protocols and methods and collect primary data in a field research site in the Western Ghats, and results are initially modeled. A second workshop revises the scenarios and prepares a second field data collection phase. This iteration permits further grounding of the conceptual framework and methods, and development and testing of a stronger, less aggregative model based on much better decisions about how different variables interact. After the second field research phase, scenarios are revised and integrated analysis and modelling of the data is done, and variables, variable sets, or system state indicators that are useful for monitoring biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being with biodiversity/ecosystem change are identified. A science-policy network is kickstarted (see impact plan).

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Theravada Buddhism is regarded as a conservative form of Buddhism that preserves 'early' Buddhism, in keeping with early Buddhist texts, while other forms of Buddhism (broadly Mahayana and Vajrayana or tantric Buddhism) developed new expressions. However, it is clear from manuscript and practitioner lineages that Theravada is not monolithic. Yogavacara designates a system of Theravada practice open to lay and ordained practitioners that involves incorporating qualities of the Buddha into the body and applying the power thus gained to soteriological and practical ends, e.g. healing and protection in warfare.\nThere are striking similarities between yogavacara and Vajrayana in terms of somatic practice and ritual enactment, although there is no evidence of non-Theravada terminology or pantheon. It is our view that these similarities relate to the shared influence of developments in understanding of such sciences as embryology, alchemy, and group theory mathematics throughout the Indian subcontinent and broader region. Yogavacara can be seen not as a corruption of Theravada, but as its development in keeping with the science and world view of pre-modern Asia.\nPartly under the influence of European colonialism, reforms swept Theravada countries during the 18-20th centuries. These based themselves on early canonical materials predating yogavacara developments. They also sought to present Buddhism as consistent with Western science, but emphasised the superiority of Eastern mind-culture in the face of the apparent superiority of Western somatic culture. The result obscured forms of Theravada such as yogavacara which did not fit with this model of Buddhism. We have clear evidence of this struggle between reform and traditional Theravada in French Cambodia. \nAs a result of such reforms and exacerbated by the destruction of Buddhist lineages and material culture-e.g. under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia-yogavacara today is marginal, surviving in lineages in Cambodian boran Theravada (now in a process of revival), in Thailand in dhammakaya practices (under threat) and in a small number of Bangkok temples, and possibly in some Bangladeshi and Burmese 'non-orthodox' lineages (subject to secrecy). Textual remains, especially meditation manuals, are also found in some Sri Lankan and Southeast Asian collections, but have been little documented, identified or edited because their content has not been recognised or understood by classically-trained (in canonical Theravada) scholars.\nThere is nevertheless an increasing scholarly recognition of the importance of yogavacara. It needs to be established whether yogavacara was the dominant form of Theravada in the pre-reform period. Put another way, is the perceived similarity of modern Theravada to early Buddhism the result of reform rather than continuous tradition and did pre-modern Theravada look more like the esoteric forms of East Asian and Tibetan Buddhism?\nThe researchers on this project, Kate Crosby and Catherine Newell, working on Sri Lanka and Thailand respectively, have noted a range of evidence for court and high-ranking monastic sponsorship of yogavacara in the 18-19th centuries. In this project they will, through archival research, seek to clarify the extent to which yogavacara was the dominant form of Theravada and what led to its demise and marginalisation. They will also bring together the primary and secondary materials relevant to yogavacara studies on a single website, through which the planned database will be accessible. Interested academics and other stakeholders will be invited to join a discussion network based around a LISTSERV-style email list. In addition to writing scholarly articles on the transition of yogavacara's standing during the reform and colonial periods, they will incorporate the findings in teaching materials, including the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell Theravada Buddhism, to ensure the findings feed directly into broader representations of Theravada.

With AHRC Research Workshops Scheme support, I propose to convene the first conference of the International Seminar of Young Tibetologists (ISYT), and lay its foundations as a sustainable international research association. This conference, and the creation of the ISYT, comes at a particularly opportune moment in the field of Tibetan studies. By providing a venue for collaboration and exchange for early-career researchers and postgraduate students, the ISYT addresses a crucial need in Tibetan studies.\n\nTibetan studies is a growing academic field. Traditionally the preserve of textual scholars and scholars of Buddhism, the shape of the field has recently changed. This is due in large part to China's opening of Tibet to outsiders in the late 1980s, which made it possible to for researchers apply more anthropological, cultural and economic approaches to Tibetan studies. With this access came a greater emphasis on knowledge of spoken Tibetan, and co-operation with Tibetan collaborators and informants. In concert with these developments, the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS), the field's premier research association, grew up from a group of thirty or so scholars to become a massive international research association with hundreds of members.\n\nThe result is twofold: firstly, the IATS Seminars, held every three years, are now massively oversubscribed; and secondly, a generation gap has emerged between the older generation of scholars, whose work was necessarily text-based, and the younger generation, who tend to research extensively in Tibet and China and often focus on more contemporary issues. Not only will the ISYT address these problems, it will create a sustainable research network that will complement the IATS.\n\nBy convening a conference specifically intended for early-career researchers and postgraduate students, the ISYT will significantly relieve the pressure the IATS Seminars now face due to oversubscription. More importantly, it will offer the younger generation of Tibetan studies researchers a novel, independent platform for sharing their research and networking with like-minded scholars.\n\nThe first conference of the ISYT will be convened 2-6 August 2007 at Wolfson College, Oxford. I proposed this location at a meeting of postgraduates and early-career researchers at the 11th Seminar of the IATS in Bonn in late August 2006, where it was met with unanimous approval. This is due not only to its central location relative to European, Tibetan, Chinese and North American scholars, but also to Oxford's status as a major centre for Tibetan studies with over a dozen postgraduates engaged in Tibet-related research.\n\nTo facilitate communication about the ISYT conference between the informal membership that already exists, and to post announcements regarding the conference, a web-designer will create an ISYT webpage. While in the first instance this site will facilitate conference organisation and will be used to manage all submitted abstracts, it is intended also to serve as a bridge from the first ISYT conference to the second. To this end, it will be augmented as an interactive website where ISYT members can post information about their research.\n\nThe conference itself, apart from serving as a venue for academic exchange, will also host meetings in which participants will draw up governing principles for the ISYT in order to ensure its viability as a research network. The intention is for the ISYT to be loosely affiliated with the IATS, and to convene conferences in those years when the IATS Seminar is not held.\n\nThe ISYT will also offer the younger generation of scholars the opportunity to have their work published in the conference proceedings. In addition, ISTY members will be involved in the publication process as volume editors and peer reviewers. This will further stimulate a collegial atmosphere among members and strengthen the ISYTas a research association.

Over 20 million Muslims live in China, comparable to the population of any existing Arab state, but there persists a deep-seated view of Muslims in China as marginal to the Islamic world. In recent years, however, the topic of Islam in China has become of greater interest to policy makers and to academics. There is now little doubt of the rising global connectedness of Muslims in China, nor of the changes that are occurring in Islamic religious beliefs and practices across China. Such changes are occurring against a backdrop of great diversity in local histories of transmission, socio-economic factors, language and life-ways. Many of these diverse local religious practices are currently under pressure from the forces of change. Sounding Islam in China proposes to use the methodologies of aural ethnography in order to map the Islamic soundscapes of contemporary China. The approach is interdisciplinary in nature, but arises out of recent trends in anthropology and ethnomusicology. Aural ethnography indicates a fieldwork-based approach to sound, experience and meaning, which may be applied not only to formally recognised types of musical performance but to any "humanly produced sounds". This approach impels an emphasis on the insights afforded by embodied, sensorial knowledge. The notion of a soundscape situates this focus within the social environment, assuming that sounds are both produced by, and implicated in the shaping of, social practices, politics, and ideologies. Chinese researchers, especially those with roots in the communities under study, enjoy greater ease of access to Muslim communities, and possess rich resources of field data and experience, but their access to contemporary trends in research is still relatively limited. For foreign researchers working on Islam in China, fieldwork still presents significant challenges. This project promotes collaboration between Western and Chinese researchers through joint field research, and an international conference. It also plans to disseminate current theoretical approaches to postgraduate students in China through a series of training workshops in the Anthropology of Sound. Areas of investigation include forms of sounded religious practices, such as the call to prayer, Qur'anic recitation, prayers, sermons, life-cycle and other rituals, and forms of religious expressive culture such as stories or devotional songs. Our focus also encompasses ways of listening, and embodied responses to religious sound and emotion. The project of mapping the pious soundscape takes as its central questions: where are the spaces for the production of Islamic sounds, and how are they being reconfigured in contemporary China? As well as 'live' practices, we are interested in media forms which transmit religious sounds and ideologies, such as DVDs carrying sermons or Qur'anic recitation, home-produced cassettes of zikr, online videos, etc. How are Muslim practices and knowledge being orally transmitted in China today? What can we hear from debates on Muslim identity and faith? Is there evidence of the formation of a Muslim civil society in China? A key aspect of the project is to disseminate its findings beyond the academy by the establishment of a website within which we will map China's Islamic soundscapes through the presentation of audio-visual material gathered by project participants in the course of fieldwork. The material will be translated and contextualised in a way designed to make it accessible to the wider public. We anticipate that the website will be of particular interest to Muslim communities in the West amongst whom there is growing interest in China's Muslims.