The Role of Local Knowledge in State-and-Transition Model Development

People who interact with rangelands on a regular basis gain practical insights about how rangelands work by living on and working with them. This local knowledge is refi ned over time as individuals see the way the land responds to weather, management, and disturbances. Local knowledge (LK) is a type of knowledge “integrally linked with the lives of people, always produced in dynamic interactions among humans and between humans and nature, and constantly changing.”1 LK could inform rangeland science and management to a much larger degree, but it often contributes little because the people who gain it are scattered across the landscape and there have been few attempts to systematically document and incorporate their knowledge into research or broad-scale management plans. State-and-transition models (STMs) developed for ecological sites (see Bestelmeyer et al., this issue) offer an ideal opportunity to integrate LK into durable and adaptive management tools. STMs require information about how vegetation has changed over time in response to management and environment; however, long-term monitoring data for each ecological site are rarely available. Many recently developed STMs rely on the LK of natural resource professionals and are supported by monitoring data and research when available.2 Other long-term residents and land users often have valuable insights about rangeland dynamics and their knowledge sometimes provides the only information available. For this paper, we focus on the LK of ranchers, because they are the primary group with whom we have worked; however, we realize that other long-term residents and land users (e.g., hunters, hikers) also might hold valuable LK about rangelands.