Seed Sharing in Amazonian Indigenous Rain Forest Communities: a Social Network Analysis in three Achuar Villages, Peru Christian Abizaid 1 & Oliver T. Coomes 2 & Mathilde Perrault-Archambault 3 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract Farmer-to-farmer seed transfers are important for plant domestication, the dissemination of improved crops and in building and maintaining agricultural diversity. Seed sharing may be conceptualized as networks through which planting material flows and landraces are disseminated and conserved. To date, research on seed sharing networks has focused on sociograms and network measures to describe their structure and key actors within them; their bivariate or multi- variate correlates have been studied using conventional statis- tics. We conducted a study of home garden agrobiodiversity and seed networks in three Achuar communities along the upper Corrientes River in Peru. We examine the distribution of home garden crop species within and across communi- ties and apply multivariate techniques within Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyse the formation and structure of seed networks and to identify key actors in seed sharing. Of partic- ular interest is the relationship among crop diversity, farmer expertise, kinship, and seed sharing behavior. Our results point to the importance of kinship relations, community size, and the ‘knowledge-plant transfer ’ nexus in shaping seed networks. Keywords Agrobiodiversity . Farmer seed exchange . Ethnobotanical knowledge . Home gardens . Indigenous peoples . Peru . Amazonia Introduction Farmers in developing regions rely on self-provisioning of seed and ‘informal’ access through gifting, bartering and pur- chase to planting material that is vital for agricultural produc- tion (Almekinders et al. 1994; Dyer et al. 2011; Jarvis et al. 2011). The importance of farmer-to-farmer exchange of seeds, cuttings and other plant propagules is increasingly recognized for its contributions to agriculture (Coomes et al. 2015). Seed exchange is a key pathway for domestication as farmers bring plants ‘in from the wild’ to their gardens and fields and share seed (Jarvis and Hodgkin 1999), as well as for the dissemina- tion of improved crop breeds through hybrid seed delivery systems (Gyawali et al. 2010; Gibson 2013). Importantly, seed exchange influences crop diversity dynamics, enabling the building and maintenance of in situ agrobiodiversity so that farmers can conserve landraces that are locally adapted to environmental conditions (Bellon and Risopoulos 2001; Thomas et al. 2011). Increasingly, farmer-to-farmer seed sharing is conceptual- ized as ‘networks’ through which planting material flows and landraces are disseminated and conserved (see Pautasso et al. 2013). 1 In many studies, seed networks are seen as embedded 1 For example, crops such as barley (Abay et al. 2011; Jensen et al. 2013), millet (Allinne et al. 2008), sorghum (Barnaud et al. 2008; McGuire 2008; Labeyrie et al. 2015), wheat (Bishaw et al. 2010; Thomas et al. 2012), rice (Subedi et al. 2003), potatoes (Zimmerer 2003), quinoa (Fuentes et al. 2012) and manioc (Dyer et al. 2011; Delêtre et al. 2011; Fu et al. 2014). Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10745-016-9852-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Christian Abizaid christian.abizaid@utoronto.ca 1 Department of Geography and School of the Environment, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada 2 Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A0B9, Canada 3 Independent Scholar, Lyon 01150, France Hum Ecol DOI 10.1007/s10745-016-9852-7