Author Rosalind Gleave writes about her new paper, available to read Open Access at People and Nature now.
Read the Plain Language Summary for the paper here.
What was the inspiration for this article?
It came from my PhD research, all of which was focussed on the Blue-crowned Laughingthrush. I used different methods (spanning social science, habitat surveys and earth observation data) to collect baseline data on this critically endangered and heavily range restricted species.
All the data were collected in China in 2019, so I was very fortunate to go out ahead of the pandemic. This was the first time local ecological knowledge data were collected and analysed for the Blue-crowned Laughingthrush (and one of first times for Asian songbird species). The study this article came from is easily my favourite PhD data chapter and yielded really exciting results. However, the chapter results were huge so it was a challenge to cut it all down into a more manageable narrative!
How does your article inform future research?
It points to some really important new avenues of research. First, we found reports of trapping of the Jiangxi population of Blue-crowned Laughingthrush, which has generally been assumed to not occur, so this is a big deal. It’s now imperative to follow up and find out more about what’s going on. We need to be asking how prevalent this is, who is behind it, where the birds are going, that kind of thing. How it might be addressed, even if only locally. Second, by performing wider-reaching surveys to see where else Blue-crowned Laughingthrush might be breeding. Our results showed that there could be additional breeding sites, and that only came up from interviewing people at 39 villages. There are hundreds across that region. Third, confirming with radio or satellite trackers whether the birds really do overwinter in the nearby hills. This has been suggested anecdotally in the past, and our results back that up, but it’s important to know this for sure. Wherever they go post-breeding they may be vulnerable, but we need to know just how vulnerable.
Why did you choose People and Nature for your research?
I’ve been a big fan of P&N since its inception, I love the BES suite of journals and when it came out P&N felt fresh and really needed. Some fantastic and important papers have come out of it already. I also coauthored a paper there in 2022 and had a positive experience. So, I suppose the journal felt like an obvious choice for my paper which is bringing together social science data and a Critically Endangered species of bird.
Relational Thinking 