BARARI is an (open science) platform to responsibly share knowledge about wild food plants in Palestine. The site developed was by the Makaneyyat team of researchers in Palestine. Our open science stance aims to make our research process and sharing mechanisms transparent and responsible to communities we belong to. We are developing protocols that allow us to share community-based knowledge responsibly within an uneven terrain of research access and exploitation.
We believe that all local names are correct and accordingly include them in their various forms to conserve the diversity of plant names. They are verified from our sources including fieldwork, community-based workshops, published literature, unpublished works, and archival sources. We welcome additions to local names at any time.
All scientific names are compliant with the “Accepted” scientific name of the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) via their open API. We realize that many scientific names have changed over the years, but believe that the GBIF platform allows the greatest flexibility as it preserves any synonyms used in the past.
All photographs were taken in the field by the research team in Palestine.
Our name reflects our emphasis on the wild and living landscape of Palestine. BARARI, translates roughly to “wildlands” in Arabic and other related languages. The name comes from the Semitic root word b-r ((بر or “wild” which comes from the Aramaic, an ancient language of Palestine where it emerges in other modern Semitic languages including Arabic and Hebrew. It also reflects our community-based engagement with the both the natural/cultural history and future possibility of Palestine.
BARARI was developed in Django, a non commercial, open-source Python web framework.
Support for BARARI has been generously provided by the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC).
We welcome with collaboration with like-minded research teams around the world.