intrinsically linked where indigenous knowledge could provide understanding of ecological and socioecological interactions to assess ecosystem service flow.
Photo credit: Anna Stanworth.
By Anna Stanworth, Kelvin S.-H. Peh, Rebecca J. Morris.
Ecosystems face a wide range of threats, including climate change and habitat loss. As ecosystems are degraded, so too are the services they provide to humans. Ecosystem services are worth over $100 trillion a year and include food, medicines, raw materials such as oil or timber, and climate and water regulation.
Many ecosystem services rely on series’ of complex interactions between species, and between these species and humans. For example, insects pollinate crops, increasing crop quality and yield. Humans then interact with these crops and benefit through increased food security. There are often many different interactions among species occurring simultaneously, making the exact role of species interactions in providing ecosystem services difficult to quantify.
To better understand these species interactions and how they connect with humans, researchers construct interaction networks. These networks link interacting species with the ecosystem services that they supply to humans, providing holistic pictures of the ecological and socio-ecological relationships that occur across landscapes and allow researchers to establish the importance of different species in providing one or multiple ecosystem services.
Unfortunately, building interaction networks requires lengthy and expensive data collection, such as trained observers watching species for many hours and recording their interactions, or using specialist DNA analyses to identify different interacting species. These expenses limit who can benefit from using interaction network approaches, particularly those managing ecosystem services at local scales, such as smallholder farmers. There has consequently been interest in collaborating with local and indigenous communities to understand how species are interacting in local ecosystems and providing benefits to humans, and providing information that can directly help communities in maintaining ecosystems services that support their livelihoods.
Embracing local and indigenous knowledge to build interaction networks empowers and conserves local knowledge and worldviews and provides information contextually relevant to the ecosystem being managed. Further, information from local and indigenous knowledge can build interaction networks at lower costs than typical methods. By developing equitable collaborations with local and indigenous communities, a wider range of users can understand and manage ecosystems in relevant and useful ways at local scales.
Relational Thinking 