Abstract
Wildlife across all land tenures is under threat from anthropogenic drivers including climate change, invasive species, and habitat loss. This study focuses on private lands, where effective management for wildlife conservation requires locally relevant knowledge about wildlife populations, habitat condition, threatening ecological processes, and social drivers of and barriers to conservation. Collaborative socio-ecological research can inform wildlife management by integrating the place-based ecological and social knowledge of private landholders with the theoretical and applied knowledge of researchers and practitioners, including that of Traditional Owners. In privately-owned landscapes, landholders are often overlooked as a source of local ecological knowledge grounded in learning through continuous embodied interaction with their environment and community. Here we report on WildTracker, a transdisciplinary socio-ecological research collaboration involving 160 landholders in Tasmania, Australia. This wildlife-focused citizen science project generated and integrated local socio-ecological knowledge in the research process. The project gathered quantitative and qualitative data on wildlife ecology, land management practices, and landholder learning via wildlife cameras, sound recorders, workshops, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. Through this on-going collaboration, landholders, researchers, and conservation practitioners established relationships based on mutual learning, gathering and sharing knowledge, and insights about wildlife conservation. Our project documents how local ecological knowledge develops and changes through everyday processes of enquiry and interaction with other knowledge holders including researchers and conservation practitioners. Qualitative insights derived from the direct experience and citizen science practices of landholders were integrated with quantitative scientific assessments of wildlife populations and habitat condition to produce a novel model of collaborative conservation research.
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De-identified interview data and quantitative ecological data may be made available up on request.
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Acknowledgements
The research team acknowledges the Tasmanian Aboriginal People, Traditional Owners of lutruwita (Tasmania) where this project was undertaken, and their enduring connection to land and sea Country. We pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging. We thank our research partner the Tasmanian Land Conservancy for its major financial, logistical, and technical assistance with this project. Associate Professor Michael Lockwood was the initial supervisor of this research project and contributed substantially to research design. Professor Chris Johnson and Professor Barry Brook are part of the research team and have contributed substantial ecological knowledge to the design of the project. We would also like to thank the many participating landholders who contributed their time, ideas and enthusiasm that made this research possible. Finally, we’d like to thank NRM South and the Land for Wildlife Program, which provided assistance with recruitment of participants.
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All authors whose names appear on this submission made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content; approved the version to be published; and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
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The authors received research funding and financial support from the Tasmanian Land Conservancy (MT) and the University of Tasmania (AD, AH).
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This project has received human and animal ethics permits from the University of Tasmania’s Human Research and Animal Ethics Research Committees (refs. H0016014 and A0015788).
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Taylor, M., Davison, A. & Harwood, A. Local Ecological Learning: Creating Place-based Knowledge through Collaborative Wildlife Research on Private Lands. Environmental Management 73, 563–578 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-023-01907-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-023-01907-9