Can Local Ecological Knowledge Contribute to Wildlife Management? Case Studies of Migratory Birds

By G. Gilchrist, M. Mallory, F. Merkel. 2005

374 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sound management of wildlife species, particularly those that are harvested, requires extensive information on their natural history and demography. For many global wildlife populations, however, insufficient scientific information exists, and alternative data sources may need to be considered in management decisions. In some circumstances, local ecological knowledge (LEK) can serve as a useful, complementary data source, and may be particularly valuable when managing wildlife populations that occur in remote locations inhabited by indigenous peoples. Although several published papers discuss the general benefits of LEK, few attempt to examine the reliability of information generated through this approach. We review four case studies of marine birds in which we gathered LEK for each species and then compared this information to empirical data derived from independent scientific studies of the same populations. We then discuss how we attempted to integrate LEK into our own conservation and management efforts of these bird species with variable success. Although LEK proved to be a useful source of information for three of four species, we conclude that management decisions based primarily on LEK, in the absence of scientific scrutiny, should be treated with caution.

Subfields: Ecology, General Health Professions, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6912142f8cde3424467b4426d3a38174df3bcf05

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. S. Pilgrim
2. M. Ziembicki
3. Brendan G. Mackey
4. C. Gagnon
5. Fikret Berkes
6. J. Pretty
7. L. Maffi
8. J. Woinarski

In General Health Professions

1. C. Gagnon
2. Fikret Berkes
3. J. Pretty
4. Dominique Berteaux

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. P. Robbins
2. A. Tsing
3. Bill Adams
4. C. Gagnon
5. Fikret Berkes
6. J. Pretty
7. Dominique Berteaux
8. J. Cinner

Citations in the corpus

• The Intersections of Biological Diversity and Cultural Diversity: Towards Integration (2009, background): “The importance of local ecological knowledge to resource management has been well described in recent years and has been a key theme of cultural ecology for decades (Berkes et al. 2000; Gadgil et al. 2000; Gilchrist et al. 2005; Pilgrim et al. 2007, 2008; Berkes 2008).”
• Integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Ecological Science: a Question of Scale (2009, methodology): “The most common approach to integrate TEK and scientific knowledge has been to compare factual ecological observations from similar temporal and spatial scales (Huntington et al. 2004a, Gilchrist et al. 2005, Fraser et al. 2006).”
• Integrating Traditional and Evolutionary Knowledge in Biodiversity Conservation: a Population Level Case Study (2006, neutral): “…are an important food source for Cree, they are secondary to certain mammals such as beaver, birds such as goose, and other fish species such as lake trout, S. namaycush); thus, the extent of TEK for charr may be more limited than it is for other species (see Hunn 1993, Gilchrist et al. 2005).”
• Trends and prospects for local knowledge in ecological and conservation research and monitoring (2008, neutral): “It has been rejected by some scientists as ‘anecdotal’, ‘imprecise’, ‘unsubstantiated’, or ‘inaccurate’ (Johannes 1993; Hobson 1993; Gilchrist et al. 2005).”
• Bridging the Science-Management Divide: Moving from Unidirectional Knowledge Transfer to Knowledge Interfacing and Sharing (2006, background): “● Local communities “own” local, indigenous, or traditional knowledge (see Gilchrist et al. 2005) that has evolved through generations of hands-on learning while meeting day-today challenges.”
• Evaluating the status of species using Indigenous knowledge: Novel evidence for major native mammal declines in northern Australia (2013, background): “The inherent nature of the information collected here, the variability in the intactness and detail of knowledge, the differing approaches of local or Indigenous knowledge systems compared with science and that such information is largely qualitative point to the need for validating such information”