Professor Christian Abizaid published Pervasive Indigenous and local knowledge of tropical wild species. The paper examines an important question that has not yet been explored in a systematic way: how widely is Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) held among Indigenous peoples and local communities? The pervasiveness of ILK, which is critical to better understand knowledge systems, conditions its promise for conservation policy and sustainability.
Abstract
The promise of Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) for conservation policy depends on how pervasively ILK is held among local people. In the Peruvian Amazon, we conducted a landscape-scale concordance analysis between (1) ILK for game, timber, and fish species collected by the largest representative ILK survey as yet undertaken in tropical forests, and (2) remotely sensed land cover as proxies for species habitat. From our survey among 4000 households in 235 communities, we find that concordant ILK is highly pervasive across gender, age, place of origin, and social status, irrespective of species and people’s indigeneity. Resource users possess more concordant knowledge than nonusers for timber and fish, not game. Concordance between ILK for fish and remote sensing is associated with cooperative forest clearing in shifting cultivation—an informal community institution in which forest peoples engage with nature. Our findings point to the promise of ILK for large-scale tropical conservation.