ORCID
- Abigail McQuatters-Gollop: 0000-0002-6043-9563
Abstract
The low cost, high applicability and community-based nature of Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) data for mapping marine benthic habitats has become increasingly popular in recent years. Nonetheless, due to persisting technocratic distrust of LEK often stemming from the unquantifiable nature of bias, the embedding of empirical data at policy levels often lags. Currently, protocols rely on high participation from stakeholders, however, such quotas are often unfeasible, with common limiting factors being the low numbers of knowledgeable individuals in remote parts of the world, and the lack of community trust in the conservation mechanism. In this study, we test whether data from a limited number of interviews with selected artisanal fishers can provide accurate and policy-valuable information as an alternative to high-participation data collection. Our work focuses on the case of Posidonia oceanica seagrass beds around five Greek islands in the eastern Aegean Sea. In comparison with remotely sensed seagrass distribution maps, our results show that the quality of selected LEK data can be exceptionally high (on average 78% accuracy; maximum 92% accuracy), arguing the point that limited-participation LEK should not be discarded as invalid at policy levels. Furthermore, the way LEK is recorded, as well as the number of years of fishing experience of the participants, were found to significantly affect the quality of data being delivered. Lastly, we show that LEK outperformed the governmentally-issued seagrass map, thus providing further evidence of fishers’ LEK ability to deliver policy-relevant data regarding the distribution of their local marine habitats.
DOI Link
Publication Date
2025-01-01
Publication Title
Ocean and Coastal Management
Volume
267
ISSN
0964-5691
Acceptance Date
2025-03-06
Deposit Date
2025-08-07
Additional Links
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Alexopoulos, K., Grandjean, T., Miliou, A., Tsimpidis, T., & McQuatters-Gollop, A. (2025) 'Is sparse local ecological knowledge accurate enough for policy? A seagrass mapping case study from five Greek islands in the Eastern Aegean Sea', Ocean and Coastal Management, 267. Available at: 10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2025.107627
