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Identifying, preserving, valuing and transmitting local knowledge about nature lie at the core of this article. From this vantage point, it deals with issues cross-cutting the fields of research, policy and civil society. More specifically, the results discussed stem from an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional research program dealing with medicinal knowledge related to biodiversity in the Marquesas Islands. It has highlighted the patterns of production and circulation of this knowledge underlain by specific gift logics and power relations, as the issues of protecting them, locally experienced as the fear of loss. These results can nurture the debate around the mechanisms of access and benefit sharing linked to the use of biologic or genetic resources in French overseas territories and beyond.