Local knowledge reconstructs historical resource use

Information on natural resource exploitation is vital for conservation but scarce in developing nations, which encompass most of the world and often lack the capacity to produce it. A growing approach to generate information about resource use in the context of developing nations relies on surveys of resource users about their recollections (recall) of past harvests. However, the reliability of harvest recalls remains unclear. Here, we show that harvest recalls can be as accurate to data collected by standardized protocols, despite that recalls are variable and affected by the age of the recollecting person and the length of time elapsed since the event. Samples of harvest recalls permit relatively reliable reconstruction of harvests for up to 39 years in the past. Harvest recalls therefore have strong potential to inform data‐poor resource systems and curb shifting baselines around the world at a fraction of the cost of conventional approaches.

自然资源开发的信息对保护工作至关重要，但在发展中国家却很稀缺，发展中国家占世界大部分地区，且往往缺乏生成此类信息的能力。在发展中国家背景下，一种越来越常用的获取资源利用信息的方法是对资源使用者进行调查，了解他们对过去收获情况的回忆。然而，收获回忆的可靠性仍不明确。在此，我们表明，收获回忆可以和标准化方案收集的数据一样准确，尽管回忆存在差异，并受到回忆者年龄以及自事件发生以来所经过时间长短的影响。收获回忆样本能够对过去长达39年的收获情况进行相对可靠的重建。因此，收获回忆有很大潜力为数据匮乏的资源系统提供信息，并以传统方法成本的一小部分遏制世界各地不断变化的基线。