Participatory monitoring (also known as collaborative monitoring, community-based monitoring, locally based monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is the regular collection of measurements or other kinds of data (monitoring), usually of natural resources and biodiversity, undertaken by local residents of the monitored area, who rely on local natural resources and thus have more local knowledge of those resources. Those involved usually live in communities with considerable social cohesion, where they regularly cooperate on shared projects.
Participatory monitoring has emerged as an alternative or addition to professional scientist-executed monitoring. [1] [2] Scientist-executed monitoring is often costly and hard to sustain, especially in those regions of the world where financial resources are limited. [3] Moreover, scientist-executed monitoring can be logistically and technically difficult and is often perceived to be irrelevant by resource managers and the local communities. Involving local people and their communities in monitoring is often part of the process of sharing the management of land and resources with the local communities. It is connected to the devolution of rights and power to the locals. [4] Aside from potentially providing high-quality information, [5] [6] [7] participatory monitoring can raise local awareness and build the community and local government expertise that is needed for addressing the management of natural resources. [4] [8]
Participatory monitoring is sometimes included in terms such as citizen science, [9] crowd-sourcing, ‘public participation in scientific research’ [10] and participatory action research.
The term ‘participatory monitoring’ embraces a broad range of approaches, from self-monitoring of harvests by local resource users themselves, to censuses by local rangers, and inventories by amateur naturalists. The term includes techniques labelled as ‘self-monitoring’, [11] [12] ranger-based monitoring’, [13] ‘event-monitoring’, [14] ‘participatory assessment, monitoring and evaluation of biodiversity’, [15] [16] ‘community-based observing’, [17] and ‘community-based monitoring and information systems’. [18]
Many of these approaches are directly linked to resource management, but the entities being monitored vary widely, from individual animals and plants, [5] [12] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] through habitats, [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] to ecosystem goods and services. [29] [30] [31] However, all of the approaches have in common that the monitoring is carried out by individuals who live in the monitored places and rely on local natural resources, and that local people or local government staff are directly involved in formulation of research questions, data collection, and (in most instances) data analysis, and implementation of management solutions based on research findings. [3] [32]
Participatory monitoring is included in the term ’participatory monitoring and management’ which has been defined as "approaches used by local and Indigenous communities, informed by traditional and local knowledge, and, increasingly, by contemporary science, to assess the status of resources and threats on their land and advance sustainable economic opportunities based on the use of natural resources". [32] term ’participatory monitoring and management’ is particularly used in tropical, Arctic and developing regions, where communities are most often the custodians of valuable biodiversity and extensive natural ecosystems.
Other definitions for participatory monitoring have also been proposed, including:
Likewise, the term ’community-based monitoring of natural resources’ has been defined as:
It has been suggested that participatory monitoring is unlikely to provide quantitative data on large-scale changes in habitat area, or on populations of cryptic species that are hard to identify or census reliably. [3] It has also been suggested that participatory monitoring is not suitable for monitoring resources that are so valuable they attract powerful outsiders. [38] Likewise, in areas where changes, threats, or interventions operate in complex fashions, where rural people do not depend on the use of natural resources and there are no real benefits flowing to the local people from doing monitoring work (or the costs to local people of involvement exceed the benefits [30] ), or where there is a poor relationship between the authorities and the local people, [39] participatory monitoring is probably less likely to yield useful data and management solutions than conventional scientific approaches. [40]
Whereas government censuses of human populations, which date perhaps to the 16th century B.C., [41] were likely the first formal attempts at environmental monitoring, [42] farmers, fishers and forest users have informally monitored resource conditions for even longer, their observations influencing survival strategies and resource use. [1]
Participatory monitoring schemes are in operation on all the inhabited continents, and the approach is beginning to appear in textbooks. [43] [44]
An international symposium on participatory monitoring was hosted by the Nordic Agency for Development and Ecology and the Zoology Department at Cambridge University in Denmark in April 2004. [45] It led to a special issue of Biodiversity and Conservation October 2005. [46]
In the Arctic, a symposium on data management and local knowledge was hosted by ELOKA and held in Boulder, USA, in November 2011. [47] It led to a special issue of Polar Geography in 2014.
In the Arctic, three circumpolar meetings were held in 2013-2014:
The first global conference on Participatory Monitoring and Management was hosted by the Brazilian Ministry of Environment (MMA) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) and held in Manaus, Brazil in September 2014. [49] [50] [51]
Thematically, participatory monitoring has considerable potential in several areas, including:
A typology of monitoring schemes has been proposed, determined on the basis of relative contributions of local stakeholders and professional researchers. [87] and supported by findings from statistical analysis of published schemes. [36] The typology identified 5 categories of monitoring schemes that between them span the full spectrum of natural resource monitoring protocols:
Category A. Autonomous Local Monitoring. In this category the whole monitoring process—from design, to data collection, to analysis, and finally to use of data for management decisions—is carried out autonomously by local stakeholders. There is no direct involvement of external agencies. For an example see. [69]
Category B. Collaborative Monitoring with Local Data Interpretation. In these schemes, the original initiative was taken by scientists but local stakeholders collect, process and interpret the data, although external scientists may provide advice and training. The original data collected by local people remain in the area being monitored, which helps create local ownership of the scheme and its results, but copies of the data may be sent to professional researchers for in-depth or larger-scale analysis. Examples are included in. [1] [14] [62]
Category C. Collaborative Monitoring with External Data Interpretation. The third most distinct group is monitoring scheme category C. These schemes were designed by scientists who also analyse the data, but the local stakeholders collect the data, take decisions on the basis of the findings and carry out the management interventions emanating from the monitoring scheme. Examples are provided in. [11] [19] [24]
Category D. Externally Driven Monitoring with Local Data Collectors. This category of monitoring scheme involves local stakeholders only in data collection. The design, analysis, and interpretation of the monitoring results are undertaken by professional researchers—generally far from the site. Monitoring schemes of category D are mostly long-running ‘citizen science’ projects from Europe and North America. See for example [88] [89]
Category E. Externally Driven, Professionally Executed Monitoring. Monitoring schemes of category E do not involve local stakeholders. Design of the scheme, analysis of the results, and management decisions derived from these analyses are all undertaken by professional scientists funded by external agencies. An example is [90]
Traditional methods of data collection for participatory monitoring use paper and pen. This has advantages in terms of low cost of materials and training, simplicity, and reduced potential for technical hitches. However, all data must be transcribed for analysis, which takes time and can be subject to transcription errors. [91] Increasingly, participatory monitoring initiatives incorporate technology, from GPS recorders to georeference the data collected on paper, [92] to drones to survey remote areas, [93] phones to send simple reports via SMS, [94] or smartphones to collect and store data. [95] Various apps exist to create and manage data collection forms on smartphones (e.g. ODK, Sapelli [96] and others [97] ).
Some initiatives find that the use of smartphones for data collection has advantages over paper-based systems. [98] The advantages include that very little equipment need be carried on a survey, a large amount and variety of data can be stored (geographical locations, photos and audio, as well as data entered onto monitoring forms) and data can be shared rapidly for analysis without transcription errors. [91] The use of smartphones can incentivise young people to get involved in monitoring, sparking an interest in conservation. [99] Some apps are especially designed to be usable by illiterate monitors. [100] [101] [102] If local people risk threats or violence by monitoring illegal activities, the true purpose of the phones can be denied, and the monitoring data locked away. [103] However, phones are expensive; are vulnerable to damage and technical issues; necessitate additional training - not least due to rapid technological change; phone charging can be a challenge (especially under thick forest canopies); and uploading data for analysis is difficult in areas without network connections. [104] [105]
A key challenge for participatory monitoring is to develop ways to store, manage and share data [106] and to do this in ways that respect the rights of the communities that supplied the data. A ‘rights-based approach to data sharing’ can be based on principles of free, prior and informed consent, and prioritise the protection of the rights of those who generated the data, and/or those potentially affected by data-sharing. [107] Local people can do much more than simply collect data: they can also define the ways that this data is used, and who has access to it.
Clear agreements on data sharing are especially important for initiatives where diverse data is collected, of variable relevance to different stakeholders. [108] For example, monitoring could on the one hand, investigate sensitive social problems within a community, or contested resources at the centre of local conflicts or illegal exploitation - data that community leaders might want to keep confidential and address locally; on the other hand, the same initiative could generate data on forest biomass, of greater interest to external stakeholders. [109]
One way to establish the rules around data sharing is to set up a data sharing protocol. This can define: [107]
Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management.
Adaptive management, also known as adaptive resource management or adaptive environmental assessment and management, is a structured, iterative process of robust decision making in the face of uncertainty, with an aim to reducing uncertainty over time via system monitoring. In this way, decision making simultaneously meets one or more resource management objectives and, either passively or actively, accrues information needed to improve future management. Adaptive management is a tool which should be used not only to change a system, but also to learn about the system. Because adaptive management is based on a learning process, it improves long-run management outcomes. The challenge in using the adaptive management approach lies in finding the correct balance between gaining knowledge to improve management in the future and achieving the best short-term outcome based on current knowledge. This approach has more recently been employed in implementing international development programs.
The Guinean forest-savanna , also known as the Guinean forest-savanna transition, is a distinctive ecological region located in West Africa. It stretches across several countries including Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. This region is characterized by a unique blend of forested areas and savannas, creating a diverse and dynamic landscape.
Natural resource management (NRM) is the management of natural resources such as land, water, soil, plants and animals, with a particular focus on how management affects the quality of life for both present and future generations (stewardship).
Participatory 3D modelling (P3DM) is a community-based mapping method which integrates local spatial knowledge with data on elevation of the land and depth of the sea to produce stand-alone, scaled and geo-referenced relief models. Essentially based on local spatial knowledge, land use and cover, and other features are depicted by informants on the model by the use of pushpins (points), yarns (lines) and paints (polygons). On completion, a scaled and geo-referenced grid is applied to facilitate data extraction or importation. Data depicted on the model are extracted, digitised and plotted. On completion of the exercise the model remains with the community.
Campo Ma'an National Park is a 2,680 square kilometer National Park in Cameroon, located in the South Region in the Océan division. It borders with Equatorial Guinea on the south, the Atlantic Ocean to its west, the Vallée-du-Ntem and the Mvila to the east. Total area of the park and buffer zone measure approximately 700, 000 hectares. The climate has two dry seasons, November to March and July to August, and two rainy seasons, April to June and August to October. Average temperature is 25°C.
Earthwatch Institute is an international environmental charity. It was founded in 1971 as Educational Expeditions International by Bob Citron and Clarence Truesdale. Earthwatch Institute supports Ph.D. researchers internationally and conducts over 100,000 hours of research annually using the Citizen Science methodology. Earthwatch's mission statement states that the organization "connects people with scientists worldwide to conduct environmental research and empowers them with the knowledge they need to conserve the planet." As such, it is one of the global underwriters of scientific field research in climate change, archaeology, paleontology, marine life, biodiversity, ecosystems and wildlife. For over fifty years, Earthwatch has raised funds to recruit individuals, students, teachers, and corporate fellows to participate in field research to understand nature's response to accelerating global change.
Genetic monitoring is the use of molecular markers to (i) identify individuals, species or populations, or (ii) to quantify changes in population genetic metrics over time. Genetic monitoring can thus be used to detect changes in species abundance and/or diversity, and has become an important tool in both conservation and livestock management. The types of molecular markers used to monitor populations are most commonly mitochondrial, microsatellites or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), while earlier studies also used allozyme data. Species gene diversity is also recognized as an important biodiversity metric for implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Ecosystem management is an approach to natural resource management that aims to ensure the long-term sustainability and persistence of an ecosystem's function and services while meeting socioeconomic, political, and cultural needs. Although indigenous communities have employed sustainable ecosystem management approaches implicitly for millennia, ecosystem management emerged explicitly as a formal concept in the 1990s from a growing appreciation of the complexity of ecosystems and of humans' reliance and influence on natural systems.
Community-based monitoring (CBM) is a form of public oversight, ideally driven by local information needs and community values, to increase the accountability and quality of social services such as health, development aid, or to contribute to the management of natural resources. Within the CBM framework, members of a community affected by a social program or environmental change track this change and its local impacts, and generate demands, suggestions, critiques and data that they then act on, including by feeding back to the organization implementing the program or managing the environmental change. For a Toolkit on Community-Based Monitoring methodology with a focus on community oversight of infrastructure projects, see www.communitymonitoring.org. For a library of resources relating to community-based monitoring of tropical forests, see forestcompass.org/how/resources.
Forest genetic resources or foresttree genetic resources are genetic resources of forest shrub and tree species. Forest genetic resources are essential for forest-depending communities who rely for a substantial part of their livelihoods on timber and non-timber forest products for food security, domestic use and income generation. These resources are also the basis for large-scale wood production in planted forests to satisfy the worldwide need for timber and paper. Genetic resources of several important timber, fruit and other non-timber tree species are conserved ex situ in genebanks or maintained in field collections. Nevertheless, in situ conservation in forests and on farms is in the case of most tree species the most important measure to protect their genetic resources.
Akure Forest Reserve is a protected area in southwest Nigeria, covering 66 km2 (25 sq mi). The Akure Forest Reserve, established in 1948 and spanning approximately 32 hectares. It was created with the primary aim of safeguarding the genetic diversity of the forest ecosystem. About 11.73% (8.2 km2) is estimated to be cleared for cocoa farming and other food crops. Aponmu and Owena Yoruba speaking communities owned the forest, though, there are also minor settlements surrounding the forest. They include Ipogun, Kajola/ Aponmu, Kajola, Ago Petesi, Akika Camp, Owena Town, Ibutitan/Ilaro Camp, Elemo Igbara Oke Camp and Owena Water new Dam.
The Ngel Nyaki Forest Reserve, whose site is historically known as Majang, is situated on the Mambilla Plateau in North East Nigeria, covering 46 km2. It can be reached on foot from Yelwa village past the Mayo Jigawal, from where it is less than half an hour’s walk to the upper edge of the forest. The elevation ranges from 1,400 metres (4,593 ft) to 1,600 metres (5,249 ft). Ngel Nyaki was formally gazetted a local authority Forest Reserve under Gashaka - Mambilla Native Authority Forest order of April 1969, but presently it is under the management of the Taraba State Government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF), with the Nigerian Montane Forest Project (NMFP) as a project partner.
Oluwa Forest Reserve is located in Ondo State, Nigeria and covers over 829 km2 (320 sq mi). It is part of the Omo, Shasha and Oluwa forest reserves, although it has become separated from the Omo and Shasha reserves. The three reserves contain some of the last remaining forest in the area. Although they are biologically unique, they are threatened by logging, hunting and agriculture. The natural vegetation of the area is tropical rainforest. However, the natural vegetation of the area except for the areas devoted to forest reserve has now been reduced to secondary regrowth forest and fallow regrowth at varying stages of development or replaced by perennial and annual crops.
The Okomu Forest Reserve is a forest block covering an area of 1081 km2 in Edo State, about 50 km west of Benin City, Nigeria. The Okomu National Park lies within the larger reserve, maintaining a small part of the forests that once covered the region as the last habitat for many endangered species.
Counter-mapping is creating maps that challenge "dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals". Counter-mapping is used in multiple disciplines to reclaim colonized territory. Counter-maps are prolific in indigenous cultures, "counter-mapping may reify, reinforce, and extend settler boundaries even as it seeks to challenge dominant mapping practices; and still, counter-mapping may simultaneously create conditions of possibility for decolonial ways of representing space and place." The term came into use in the United States when Nancy Peluso used it in 1995 to describe the commissioning of maps by forest users in Kalimantan, Indonesia, to contest government maps of forest areas that undermined indigenous interests. The resultant counter-hegemonic maps strengthen forest users' resource claims. There are numerous expressions closely related to counter-mapping: ethnocartography, alternative cartography, mapping-back, counter-hegemonic mapping, deep mapping and public participatory mapping. Moreover, the terms: critical cartography, subversive cartography, bio-regional mapping, and remapping are sometimes used interchangeably with counter-mapping, but in practice encompass much more.
Globally, Nepal is ranked fourth in terms of vulnerability to climate change. Floods spread across the foothills of the Himalayas and bring landslides, leaving tens of thousands of houses and vast areas of farmland and roads destroyed. In the 2020 edition of Germanwatch's Climate Risk Index, it was judged to be the ninth hardest-hit nation by climate calamities during the period 1999 to 2018. Nepal is a least developed country, with 28.6 percent of the population living in multidimensional poverty. Analysis of trends from 1971 to 2014 by the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) shows that the average annual maximum temperature has been increasing by 0.056 °C per year. Precipitation extremes are found to be increasing. A national-level survey on the perception-based survey on climate change reported that locals accurately perceived the shifts in temperature but their perceptions of precipitation change did not converge with the instrumental records. Data reveals that more than 80 percent of property loss due to disasters is attributable to climate hazards, particularly water-related events such as floods, landslides and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).
Conservation paleobiology is a field of paleontology that applies the knowledge of the geological and paleoecological record to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Despite the influence of paleontology on ecological sciences can be traced back at least at the 18th century, the current field has been established by the work of K.W. Flessa and G.P. Dietl in the first decade of the 21st century. The discipline utilizes paleontological and geological data to understand how biotas respond to climate and other natural and anthropogenic environmental change. These information are then used to address the challenges faced by modern conservation biology, like understanding the extinction risk of endangered species, providing baselines for restoration and modelling future scenarios for species range's contraction or expansion.
Community Based Mangrove Management (CBMM) is a sustainable approach for conserving the rapidly disappearing mangrove forests. It can be defined as community driven management and rehabilitation of mangrove forests involving resource users in the management process directly. CBMM decentralizes authority and power from government to local communities. The dual aim of CBMM is the ongoing conservation of mangroves and generation of sustainable livelihood.
The biogeographic regionalization of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity, known as Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World (TEOW), is made up of 867 ecoregions that are divided into 14 biomes. In addition to offering a comprehensive map of terrestrial biodiversity, TEOW also provides a global species database for ecological analyses and priority setting, a logical biogeographic framework for large-scale conservation strategies, a map for enhancing biogeographic literacy, and a foundation for the Global 200.