The research, led by Navya Vikraman Nair of the University of Waterloo together with Jeremy Pittman and Prateep Kumar Nayak, examines how local ecological knowledge, often abbreviated as LEK, can inform participatory biodiversity monitoring in a climate-vulnerable blue carbon ecosystem. Blue carbon ecosystems, which include seagrasses, salt marshes, and mangroves, are among the planet’s most effective natural carbon sinks, but they are also among the most rapidly disappearing. Global assessments have documented accelerating losses of seagrass meadows worldwide and a rising pace of human impact on the ocean, making robust monitoring urgently important. In many data-limited regions, however, the ecological baselines needed to detect change simply do not exist, and that is precisely the gap the researchers set out to explore.

To gather evidence, the team combined structured surveys involving 47 participants with semi-structured interviews and participatory ranking exercises involving 28 fishers and other lagoon-dependent stakeholders. This dual approach allowed the researchers not only to document what people were observing in the lagoon but also to understand which observations communities themselves considered most important to monitor. The methodological design reflects a growing recognition in the environmental social sciences that monitoring is not merely a technical exercise but a social process, shaped by whose knowledge counts, whose priorities are heard, and who benefits from the resulting data.

The findings are striking in their breadth. Participants reported changes spanning six ecological and environmental domains: biodiversity, the condition of blue carbon ecosystems, water quality, ecosystem functions, climate and hydrological change, and anthropogenic and governance pressures. In other words, the fishers and other residents of Chilika were not simply reporting on fish catches. Their observations extended to the health of seagrass beds, the salinity and clarity of the water, the timing of seasonal floods, the behavior of migratory species, and the effects of management decisions on the lagoon’s ecology. This multidomain richness suggests that local knowledge can capture dimensions of ecosystem change that conventional monitoring programs, often constrained by budget and personnel, routinely miss.

From this empirical material the researchers developed what they call the LEK Ecological Indicator Wheel, a conceptual framework for organizing LEK-derived observations and potential monitoring variables. The framework arranges participant-reported observations across the six domains, providing a structured way to translate lived experience into candidate indicators for future monitoring programs. Crucially, the authors are careful about what the wheel is and is not. It is not a validated ecological index, and the observations it organizes are candidates for future monitoring and ecological testing rather than established measurements. This distinction matters, because the scientific credibility of community-derived indicators depends on rigorous validation against independent ecological data.

The study also confronts an important limitation with unusual candor. Although the instrument addressed multiple taxonomic groups, the prioritized observations turned out to be predominantly fisheries oriented. Fishers, naturally enough, notice what affects their livelihoods: the abundance of fish, prawns, and crabs, the state of the habitats that support them, and the water conditions that determine productivity. This orientation limits the extent to which the findings can support inference about lagoon-wide biodiversity, since birds, benthic invertebrates, and other components of the ecosystem receive less attention. The authors acknowledge this constraint explicitly, and it highlights a broader challenge for community-based monitoring: the knowledge a community holds reflects the relationships that community has with its environment, and those relationships are often selective.

Why does this matter beyond Chilika? The answer lies in the global context of biodiversity governance. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework commits nations to halting and reversing biodiversity loss, and meeting those commitments will require monitoring at scales and in places where professional scientific capacity is thin. Multicountry assessments have shown that local communities can monitor tropical resources with accuracy comparable to professional scientists, and recent work argues for involving citizens directly in tracking progress toward global biodiversity targets. In this light, the Chilika study offers a template for how LEK might be systematically harvested, organized, and tested in blue carbon ecosystems around the world, from Southeast Asian seagrass meadows to West African mangrove deltas.

The technical logic of the approach deserves attention. Structured biodiversity monitoring, as the monitoring literature emphasizes, requires clear objectives, repeatable methods, and indicators that respond predictably to ecological change. LEK-derived observations can enter this machinery at the indicator-selection stage, where they can suggest variables that scientists might not have thought to measure, flag changes that occurred before formal monitoring began, and identify spatial and temporal patterns worth investigating. Participatory ranking exercises add a second layer of value by revealing community monitoring priorities, which can align research agendas with local needs and increase the legitimacy and durability of monitoring programs. When communities help choose what is measured, they are more likely to sustain the measurement over time.

There are also deeper epistemological stakes. Scholars of traditional ecological knowledge have long argued that ignoring fishers’ knowledge means missing the boat, both figuratively and literally, because resource users accumulate observations across seasons and decades that no research program could replicate. Frameworks such as the multiple evidence base approach call for connecting diverse knowledge systems on equal footing rather than treating local knowledge as raw material to be extracted and validated by science. The Chilika study sits squarely within this tradition, but it pushes further by attempting to structure LEK into a form that can interface with formal monitoring design, a step that many earlier studies stopped short of taking.

The path forward, the authors argue, requires two things: ecological validation and community co-design. Validation means testing LEK-derived indicators against independent ecological measurements to establish their reliability and sensitivity. Co-design means involving fishers and other stakeholders in every stage of developing monitoring programs, from selecting indicators to interpreting results to shaping management responses. If both conditions are met, LEK-derived observations could complement conventional monitoring, strengthen participatory assessment, and support adaptive management in climate-vulnerable blue carbon ecosystems. For Chilika Lagoon, whose social-ecological history includes dramatic hydrological interventions and contested governance, that prospect is more than academic. For coastal communities worldwide watching their seagrasses thin and their catches shift, the study offers a hopeful message: the people who live closest to change may hold some of the most valuable data about it, provided science learns to listen systematically and communities remain partners rather than subjects.

Subject of Research: Local ecological knowledge for participatory biodiversity monitoring in the blue carbon ecosystems of Chilika Lagoon, India

Article Title: Can local ecological knowledge inform biodiversity monitoring in climate-vulnerable blue carbon ecosystems?

Article References: Can local ecological knowledge inform biodiversity monitoring in climate-vulnerable blue carbon ecosystems?. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02699-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02699-4

Keywords: local ecological knowledge, biodiversity monitoring, blue carbon ecosystems, Chilika Lagoon, seagrass, small-scale fisheries, community-based monitoring, climate change, participatory research, adaptive management, water quality, Regional Environmental Change