Harnessing the collective intelligence of stakeholders for conservation

Abstract

B ecause environmental and natural resource stakeholders hold valuable knowledge about social-ecological dynamics, researchers often attempt to incorporate local knowledge into environmental models and resource management (Gray et al. 2018). This knowledge is considered valuable because many resource users routinely engage with the natural environment through activities like fishing or hunting (Arlinghaus and Krause 2013). In addition, natural resource users may share information about environmental, policy, or social changes across their social networks (Barnes et al. 2016), allowing them to accumulate and refine knowledge and observations across years and locations (eg anglers moving among lakes; Carruthers et al. 2018). Such local ecological knowledge is useful and can be integrated with expert scientific knowledge to provide a more comprehensive understanding of pressing environmental issues (Gray et al. 2012). At the same time, recent technological developments have vastly improved the way this information is not only collected from stakeholders but also provided through new, cyberenabled forms of participatory environmental assessments (Voinov et al. 2018). For example, the emergence of citizen science (Cooper et al. 2007; Bonney et al. 2009; Shirk et al. 2012) and the internet has changed the nature of data-sourcing by extending the geographic reach of ecological surveys considerably, and in some cases has shifted monitoring away from the consultation of a small minority of scientific experts to now include larger scale collaborations involving dozens to thousands of local stakeholders and scientists (Shirk et al. 2012). More recently, traditional citizen science has been expanded to include open online collaborative communities, leading to scientific discoveries that blend the strengths of humans and machines (Mugar et al. 2014; Trouille et al. 2019). By integrating both local and expert knowledge, citizen science and other crowdsourcing approaches can reduce the uncer

Modeling and understanding social–ecological knowledge diversity

“…At the same time, sustainable management of marine resources benefits from the participation of a multitude of stakeholders, and by extension the diversity of knowledge from resource users, environmental organizations, managers, and scientists (Folke, 2004;Reed, 2008;Steins et al, 2019;Voinov et al, 2016). In natural resource management, synthesizing different knowledge types distributed across diverse stakeholders may increase the potential for innovative ideas to emerge, and collectively provide insight into how these complex systems are structured (Folke, 2004;Gray et al, 2020;Steins et al, 2019;Stephenson et al, 2016). This is now considered an essential practice in the management of transboundary resources like marine fisheries (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2000;Folke, 2004).…”

The diversity bonus in pooling local knowledge about complex problems

“…They may also inherit traditional ecological knowledge from past generations (3) or share information about environmental, policy, or social changes across their social networks (4). This process can lead to the accumulation of valuable local knowledge (LK) that can complement or be substituted for scientific knowledge, especially in data-poor situations (2,5,6).…”

The relationship between social identity and cognitive diversity in environmental stakeholders

“…These so-called socialecological interdependences commonly lead to complex system behaviors and dynamics that are hard to predict (26,27). As a result, understanding and managing natural resource systems typically entails the participation of cognitively diverse individuals who bring a wider range of perspectives and heuristics to the table, and their diverse knowledge pool can lead to a greater cognitive coverage and a boosted problem-solving capability (7,8,28,29).…”