Bridging Knowledge Creation and Conservation Practice through Participatory Action Research on Private Lands

Ongoing failure to resolve how wildlife and people can co-exist on private land contributes the global decline of populations. Experience in Tasmania, Australia suggests a disconnect between researchers, environmental agencies, landholders that prevents new scientific insights from translating into improved management practices. This case study based participatory action research model, describes conservation initiative called WildTracker. WildTracker created hands-on collaborations among landholders, university Tasmanian Land Conservancy (TLC). Landholders 3 regions (total area 9977 km2) participated an iterative 2-year process involving problem-framing workshops, data collection (mammals, birds, habitat) using cameras sound recorders, analysis, discussion results. Participants contributed more than 2,000 hours project, resulting 500,000 observations, with many now implementing findings, guided by locality-specific populations, feral animals, habitat condition. has evolved short-term project ongoing collaborative citizen science program is documenting contributing on-the-ground evolving outcomes.