Evaluating Rapid Participatory Rural Appraisal as an Assessment of Ethnoecological Knowledge and Local Biodiversity Patterns

Abstract

There is a pressing need to find both locally and globally relevant tools to measure and compare biodiversity patterns. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is important to biodiversity monitoring, but has a contested role in preliminary biodiversity assessments. We examined rapid participatory rural appraisal (rPRA) (a tool commonly used for local needs assessments) as an alternative to surveys of vascular plants conducted by people with local knowledge. We used rPRA to determine the local-knowledge consensus on the average richness, diversity, and height of local grasses and trees in three habitats surrounding Boumba, Niger, bordering Park-W. We then conducted our own vascular plant surveys to collect information on plant richness, abundance, and structure. Using a qualitative ranking, we compared TEK-based assessments of diversity patterns with our survey-based assessments. The TEK-based assessments matched survey-based assessments on measures of height and density for grasses and trees and tree richness. The two assessments correlated poorly on herb richness and Simpson's D value for both trees and grasses. Plant life form and gender of the participant affected the way diversity patterns were described, which highlights the usefulness of TEK in explaining local realities and indicates limitations of using TEK as a large-scale assessment tool. Our results demonstrate that rPRA can serve to combine local-knowledge inquiry with scientific study at a cost lower than vascular plant surveys and demonstrates a useful blunt tool for preliminary biodiversity assessment.

The “How” and “Why” of Including Gender and Age in Ethnobotanical Research and Community-Based Resource Management

“…The research began in August 2005 with an initial rapid rural appraisal to establish the community stakeholder groups, conduct initial assessments of community resource use, and identify natural resources of local ethnobotanical and conservation importance (Mueller et al 2010). The stakeholder analysis in 2005 was conducted originally to inform the larger ethnobotanical study, which was examining the ways local knowledge can inform global conservation initiatives (Mueller 2009).…”

“…These pictures, taken initially to serve as vouchers for plant identification, were all laminated and brought back to the community on subsequent visits to be used as tools in participatory research methods. This set of laminated photo cards represented a majority of the local natural resources based on the botanical surveys conducted in the region (Mueller et al 2010). The authors then selected seventy-five laminated photos cards depicting local plants that had been listed in interviews and observed to be used for human food, animal fodder, or medicine.…”

Community Monitoring of Carbon Stocks for REDD+: Does Accuracy and Cost Change over Time?

“…Where the aim of monitoring is to obtain forest biomass data for management decisions at the local scale, alternative monitoring approaches that involve local people are emerging [27][28][29][30][31]. It has been suggested that such approaches have considerable potential to complement professional monitoring in developing countries because they may be relatively cheap.…”

Collaboration Between Management and Anthropology Researchers: Obstacles and Opportunities

“…RA follows broad principles, such as an iterative process with close attention to the native's point of view (in Geertz's 1974 andMalinowski's 1922 term;R. Chambers, 1994;Mueller et al, 2010). Anthropology was only one of several disciplinary influences in RA (R. Chambers, 1994), but core anthropological values are central to its practice.…”