The monitoring of trends in the status of species or habitats is routine in developed countries, where it is funded by the state or large nongovernmental organizations and often involves large numbers of skilled amateur volunteers. Far less monitoring of natural resources takes place in developing countries
Resumen: El monitoreo de tendencias en el estatus de especies o hábitats es rutinario en los países desarrollados, donde es financiado por el estado o por grandes organizaciones no gubernamentales y a menudo involucra a grandes números de voluntarios amateurs competentes. El monitoreo de recursos naturales es menos intenso en los países en desarrollo, donde las agencias estatales tienen presupuestos pequeños, hay menos profesionales o amateurs competentes y las condicionesPalabras Clave: conservación, evaluación de la biodiversidad, esquemas de monitoreo, intereses locales, manejo de recursos naturales
ABSTRACT. Will community monitoring assist in delivering just and equitable REDD+? We assessed whether local communities can effectively estimate carbon stocks in some of the world's most carbon rich forests, using simple field protocols, and we reviewed whether community monitoring exists in current REDD+ pilots. We obtained similar results for forest carbon when measured by communities and professional foresters in 289 vegetation plots in Southeast Asia. Most REDD+ monitoring schemes, however, contain no community involvement. To close the gulf between United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change texts on involving communities and field implementation realities, we propose greater embedding of community monitoring within national REDD+ pilot schemes, which we argue will lead to a more just REDD+.
The rapid global growth of conservation schemes designed to incentivize local communities to conserve natural resources has placed new importance on biological monitoring to assess whether agreements and targets linked to payments are being met. To evaluate competence in natural resource monitoring, we compared data on status and trends collected independently by local-community members and trained scientists for 63 taxa and five types of resource use in 34 tropical forest sites across four countries over 2.5 years. We hypothesized that the results would vary according to differences in the education and value systems of the monitors. We found that, despite considerable differences in countries, cultures, and the types of natural resources monitored, the community members and the scientists produced similar results for the status of and trends in species and natural resources. Our findings highlight the potential value of locally based natural resource monitoring for conservation decisionmaking across developing countries.
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