Connecting local knowledge and research: Strategies for promoting collaboration between managers and scientists

Background/Question/Methods

Human communities worldwide are seeking to solve environmental problems that involve multivariate consideration of human needs, maintenance of ecological processes, and conservation of species. The scientific community is contributing to this effort and has leveraged its impact through partnerships with extension specialists and others to maximize application of findings to societal needs. As need increases, scientists are broadening collaborations and evaluating means by which stakeholders and the general public can contribute directly to research. Initial efforts have emphasized public contribution to data collection and processing, often through distributed computing and crowdsourcing. Effective projects include the USA National Phenology Network, which has amassed extensive phenological records from observations and work of many volunteers, and the computer game foldit, which has enlisted more than 57,000 individuals in finding protein-folding structures for proteins (Cooper et al., 2010).

In rangeland management, collaboration between ranchers and scientists offers opportunities to explore integrative work across even larger portions of the research cycle, from hypothesis generation to conclusion synthesis. Rangelands are the epitome of working landscapes, providing forage provisioning services and habitat alongside other key ecosystem services. To optimize production of these multiple benefits requires deep understanding of local ecosystem dynamics and their human context. Thus, ranchers and scientists can both benefit from direct exchange: Ranchers offer essential long-term local knowledge and connection to place and human community; scientists provide research experience and skills. Here we summarize perspective gained from ten years of integrated collaborative research between researchers and ranchers in a working grassland landscape in California.

Results/Conclusions

In this partnership, researchers provided time series analysis of landscape-scale imagery to ranchers who analyzed them and made real-time adjustments to grazing strategies as they deemed appropriate to improve forage provisioning and weed control. Researchers and ranchers worked together further to test hypotheses about rangeland restoration that the ranchers generated. Researchers gained access to local knowledge and novel hypotheses and saw findings translated quickly to management application. Ranchers gained quantitative information about ecosystem functioning of their properties and developed increased familiarity with the scientific process and geospatial analyses. We conclude that direct collaborations between researchers and ranchers provide powerful means to promote science-based management and to democratize research efforts.