Three species highly valued by the Indigenous Wayãpi community (Tometes trilobatus, Myloplus rubripinnis, Hoplias aimara) captured with a cast net on the upper Oyapock River in French Guiana. ©Sébastien Brosse

by Opale Coutant, Damien Davy, Arnaud Jahn-Oyac, Gregory Quartarollo, Alice Valentini, Tony Dejean, Sébastien Brosse, and Jérôme Murienne.

Read the full paper here.

As our world changes and biodiversity declines, there is a growing effort to integrate Indigenous knowledge into conservation strategies to tackle environmental challenges.

Indigenous knowledge offers a comprehensive view of nature, encompassing interdependent ecological, environmental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects. The knowledge, values, and practices of Indigenous peoples and local communities provide valuable insights for understanding and better addressing social-environmental problems. However, research approaches that convert knowledge into numerical values may disconnect knowledge from its place-based context.

To see if current conservation strategies relying on biodiversity measurements also integrate local communities’ interconnectedness with nature, we compared standardised biodiversity assessments with Indigenous knowledge from the Wayãpi community along the Oyapock River in French Guiana.

French Guiana is home to various ethnic groups that differ drastically in their use of natural resources and their relationship with nature. This makes nature conservation challenging because policies need to be tailored to different contexts, and environmental decision-making should also include people with different worldviews and ways of sharing knowledge.

We showed that Indigenous knowledge can offer similar information on species distribution as standardised assessments. However, when viewed in its place-based context, Indigenous knowledge gives a different perspective on the region’s wildlife, reflecting foraging practices, spiritual beliefs, and traditions. Moreover, although the Oyapock River is not the most heavily affected by human activities in French Guiana, Indigenous knowledge also embodies environmental changes and biodiversity declines due to gold mining and hunting.

Our results suggest that conservation policies in French Guiana, which currently rely on measures such as species rarity and vulnerability, do not fully consider the Indigenous communities’ connection with nature. We recommend making conservation policies fairer by including Indigenous knowledge through relevant and inclusive participatory processes. Additionally, combining different knowledge systems could significantly improve conservation strategies.