Abstract
Most of the planet’s vital ecosystems are managed on lands owned by Indigenous peoples. Indigenous people face many challenges in managing these lands, including rapidly growing threats causing species extinctions and ecosystem losses. In response, many Indigenous groups are looking for ethical ways to use digital technology and data analytical tools to support their existing knowledge practices to solve complex environmental management problems. We draw on an action co-research project to show how a range of knowledge coproduction mechanisms were developed and applied to weave Indigenous knowledge, artificial intelligence (AI), and technical sources to monitor the health of Nardab, a culturally significant and Ramsar-listed wetland in Australia's World Heritagelisted Kakadu National Park. The coproduction mechanisms included: holistic assessments of the health of indicators; a dynamic and creative decision-support tool to adaptively manage a complex system; ongoing monitoring and testing of knowledge used for collaborative action; and Indigenous-led governance of research activities and impact at local and regional scales. It was important for local Bininj traditional owners to determine where and how multiple sources of evidence could or should be used and applied to direct and assess on-the-ground actions as part of this collaborative and cross-cultural knowledge sharing and coproduction process. At Nardab, this required negotiating the evidence from qualitative Indigenous-led assessments of significant sites and quantitative ecological information collected and analyzed from cameras and drone surveys. The coproduction mechanisms developed provided a practical and ethical means of empowering different sources of knowledge for adaptive decision making while respecting and protecting differences in how knowledge is generated, interpreted, and applied.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 36 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Ecology and Society: a journal of integrative science for resilience and sustainability |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Kakadu is jointly managed by the Australian Government and its Indigenous traditional owners, collectively known as Bininj in the north of the Park and Mungguy in the south. This project was designed by a Bininj/Mungguy research steering committee (RSC) with traditional owner membership from all the clans in the Kakadu region. The committee was established to guide research approval and activities in this comanaged protected area. The RSC invited a group of non-Indigenous researchers to collaborate on this project to develop and test Bininj and Mungguy healthy Country indicators to guide adaptive and collaborative on-the-ground management actions at selected sites in Kakadu. The four-year research project was supported by Australia’s National Environmental Science Program (https:// www.nespnorthern.edu.au/projects/nesp/healthy-country-indicators/).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance.
