Many of the most biodiverse locations on earth consist of landscapes inhabited by human societies with subsistence economies that depend on the harvest of the same resources researchers want to protect and study. In such contexts, especially when the rights to resource use are protected by law, it is essential for researchers, conservationists and practitioners to carefully consider and engage local peoples to ensure the success and efficiency of their work and to help protect the wellbeing of all stakeholders. My study site, the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, is very similar to this. I designed my initial research to explore: 1) methods to justly and effectively involve local and indigenous people in ecological research, and 2) the importance of local and indigenous people to such research. I then followed this up by integrating the results into broader research looking at trends in traditional environmental knowledge loss/retention and neotropical mammal occupancy in the context of rapid land-use change and globalization. There is an extensive literature on traditional environmental knowledge and neotropical mammals. Yet there is a dearth of publications on these topics on the context of Caribbean Coast, Nicaragua. Additionally, few research efforts have looked explicitly at the interface between the two broad topics. This dissertation builds on the literature by: 1) providing case studies concerning both traditional environmental knowledge and neotropical mammals from a region that is under-represented in academic publications, and 2) describes research that explicitly considers the process of involving local peoples into ecological research. In Chapter 1, I test a social science method for understanding traditional environmental knowledge and discuss how the results can be integrated into ecological research. In Chapter 2, I worked with locals to apply their knowledge of Baird's tapirs to a large monitoring program in a way that permitted me to compare the efficiency of multiple Baird's tapir sampling techniques, including some that integrated traditional knowledge and one that did not. In Chapters 3 and 4 I report on broader research looking at general trends in traditional environmental knowledge loss/retention and neotropical mammal occupancy over time. I found that mental model interviews are a fairly easy, but effective means for ecologists to understand how local peoples consider the ecosystems they live in, to learn how to communicate with locals about their environment, and to learn how to best integrate locals into Western science fieldwork. In addition, I found that local environmental knowledge can affect the efficiency of ecological sampling, which underscores the importance of understanding the process of local involvement in wildlife research and integrating local knowledge in a systematic way. Research on traditional environmental knowledge and wildlife occupancy reveal a landscape that remains rich in biocultural diversity, but faces threats and possible declines in wildlife and traditional knowledge in the near future. Larger species who are more sensitive to habitat change such as Baird's tapirs, jaguars, and white-lipped are particularly at risk. This research contributes to the field of ecology by underscoring the importance of justly and effectively including local stakeholders in research. My hope is that many of the lessons I learned and the results I obtained can be applied in the coming years to help conserve biocultural diversity in the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.
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