Examining Private Landowners’ Knowledge Systems for an Invasive Species

Shared ecological knowledge about the impacts of biological invasions can facilitate the collective action necessary to achieve desired management outcomes. Since its introduction to an island archipelago in South America, the North American beaver has caused major changes to the ecosystem. We exami...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Santo, Anna R., Guillozet, Kathleen, Sorice, Michael G., Baird, Timothy D., Gray, Steven, Donlan, C. Josh, Anderson, Christopher Brian
Tipo de documento: artigo
Estado:Versão publicada
Data de publicação:2017
País:Argentina
Recursos:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositório:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/64026
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/64026
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Concept Mapping
Local Ecological Knowledge
Mental Models
Network Analysis
North American Beaver (Castor Canadensis)
Private Lands
Tierra del Fuego
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/5.9
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/5
Descrição
Resumo:Shared ecological knowledge about the impacts of biological invasions can facilitate the collective action necessary to achieve desired management outcomes. Since its introduction to an island archipelago in South America, the North American beaver has caused major changes to the ecosystem. We examined landowners’ mental models of how beavers impact ecosystem services in riparian areas to understand the potential to implement a large-scale eradication program. We used ethnographic interviews to characterize individual landowners’ perceptions about beaver-caused changes to ecosystems and landowners’ wellbeing, and examined the degree to which they are shared. While the eradication initiative focuses on ecosystem integrity, landowners considered impacts on provisioning services to be most salient. Landowners did not have a highly shared causal model of beaver impacts, which indicates a diverse knowledge system. This lack of consensus on how beavers impact riparian areas provides some optimism for garnering support for eradication, and also offers insights into challenges with mental modeling methodologies.