A groundbreaking study shows that Amazonians’ knowledge, behaviors, and beliefs are just as trustworthy as traditional scientific methods now in use.

An international study led by the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona’s Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and the UAB’s Department of Animal Health and Anatomy suggests that knowledge of Amazonian dwellers can be a game changer in the rush to analyze animal population trends in a context of urgent need for conservation strategies and limited financial resources.

Researchers from Spain, Brazil, Peru, the United States, and the United Kingdom participated in the study, which was just published in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 

The Amazon rainforest is home to 390 billion trees and one of the world’s most diverse biodiversity zones in the world’s main river basin. However, deforestation in the Amazon is on the rise, resulting in unprecedented biodiversity loss. Given present rates of deforestation, 27 percent of the Amazon will be gone by 2030. The impact of various human activities on its wildlife can only be determined by reliable and up-to-date estimations of animal population abundance. The faster high-quality information on population trends can be obtained, the more effective management and conservation efforts can be.

Evaluating wildlife abundance, on the other hand, remains complicated. Scientific studies have conventionally used methods that consist of repeatedly walking on transects throughout the forest to count the sighted animals, but these methods require significant logistical and financial resources, particularly for long-term studies conducted in difficult-to-access areas, which tend to have the highest biological value.

Techniques based on local ecological knowledge (LEK) have only lately begun to be considered as a feasible method for estimating wildlife abundance in the scientific community. LEK is defined as knowledge, practices, and beliefs gained by local peoples via firsthand empirical observation and engagement with local ecosystems. However, the purported subjectivity of their empirical observations, as well as the lack of confirmation as a scientific, systematic, and precise approach, are obstacles to employing LEK methods.

Researchers examined the abundance of 91 wild species (including animals, birds, and tortoises) obtained after sampling over 7,000 kilometers of line transects and conducting 291 interviews on the LEK of local people in 17 sites across the Amazon in this groundbreaking study. The results revealed a high similarity in predicted abundance between the two methodologies, indicating that local knowledge was as dependable as the established scientific methods currently in use. Furthermore, the researchers discovered that LEK is considerably more powerful than standard line transects for several species that are rarely sighted on transects, such as nocturnal, cryptic, less abundant, or persecuted species.

According to Franciany Braga-Pereira, lead author of the study and researcher at ICTA-UAB and Universidade Federal de Paraba (UFPB), local people’s perception is multisensory, involving hearing, smelling, and observing indirect visual signs, such as footprints and scratches, which increase local people’s ability to detect the presence and estimate the abundance of an animal.

“In addition, different from surveys on conventional line transects, LEK’s effort involves different scales since local people have contact with the forest when carrying out their usual activities, such as hunting, fishing, agriculture and harvesting of timber and non-timber products, at all times of the day and year, and throughout the territory where they live.” 

Prof Pedro Mayor, a senior author of the study and researcher from the UAB’s Department of Animal Health and Anatomy, states that “in terms of effort, LEK implies a high number of hours dedicated to observing animals in the forest, widely distributed over time during their daily activities.”

Linear transects, on the other hand, need significantly less but very intense effort because they are usually concentrated in two or three weeks of labor. Locals explore the forest both at night and during the day, but linear transects are often conducted only during the day. This distinction explains why traditional monitoring by linear transects cannot offer information on all species, particularly those that are secretive and have nocturnal behaviors, as discovered in our study.

The authors emphasize that incorporating LEK into community-based wildlife monitoring projects (in which people participate in both data collection and interpretation) could considerably improve the scientific quality and contribute to the long-term viability of the world’s tropical forests.

“Ecological knowledge of local populations is more accurate than 10 years of conventional scientific monitoring for animal abundance in the Amazon,” adds Franciany Braga-Pereira. 

Furthermore, this strategy empowers local people, who are important stakeholders with the right to manage their natural resources and build lawful, equitable, and successful conservation projects. Finally, the knowledge that arises from local communities is autonomous and totally dependent on their will, allowing it to be carried out even in the face of budgetary limits or the stoppage of external research as a result of national or worldwide crises.

“A great example was the restriction in movement during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, in which many protected areas worldwide remained closed to external researchers for a long period, and the only possible fauna monitoring was that carried out independently by the locals living there,” concludes Franciany Braga-Pereira. 

Source: 10.1111/2041-210X.13773

Image Credit: Pedro Pérez

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