From territorio to Pacha: The epistemology of land system science in Latin America

Abstract. Land system science (LSS) has emerged as a central discipline at the intersection of global environmental change and sustainability research, yet its core vocabulary, publication networks, and conceptual frameworks remain largely anchored in the English language and associated Western scientific traditions. This creates particular challenges in Latin America, where decades of academic, governmental, and Indigenous and local knowledge on land-related processes have developed through distinct terminological and epistemological traditions that do not map directly onto LSS concepts. We conducted a multilingual survey of 156 land systems actors across Latin America, spanning academic, governmental, non-governmental, and community-based organizations, to characterize how the field is understood, translated, and operationalized across the region. We found that engagement with land systems topics exceeds identification with the LSS term itself, suggesting that the Latin American land systems community is larger than those identifying with LSS. Conceptual frameworks used in the region are pluralistic, with social-ecological systems, territorial studies, landscape ecology, and political ecology all sharing questions that LSS addresses under a single label. A majority of respondents supported developing a shared Spanish and Portuguese equivalent for LSS, with a clear preference for terms rooted in territorio over biophysical alternatives, reflecting deeper ontological commitments to land as a socially constructed and politically inhabited space. Drawing on these preferences, we propose Ciencias de sistemas territoriales (Spanish) and Ciências de sistemas territoriais (Portuguese) as working translations of land systems science for the Latin American context. Inclusion of Indigenous and local knowledge into research remains shallow and epistemologically stratified, concentrated among researchers with critical or transdisciplinary orientations rather than fixed within the whole field. Taken together, these findings call for deeper engagement among the broader community of LSS actors in terminological dialogue and knowledge co-production that would allow Latin American, Indigenous, and relational traditions to shape the foundations of land system science globally.