Using local ecological knowledge as evidence to guide management: A community-led harvest calculator for muskoxen in Greenland

Indigenous peoples manage or have tenure rights on over a quarter of the world’s land surface. While there is growing interest in “evidence-based” natural resource management, there are few documented experiences with “evidence-based” practice in community-managed lands. We explore the evidence required for decisions about harvesting of a community-managed muskox herd in Greenland, and the collaboration needed to acquire this evidence. We present the development, application and outcome of a user-friendly demographic model - a harvest calculator - and we show how Local Ecological Knowledge was used throughout the process and combined with scientific knowledge. The community members identified suitable harvest scenarios with the use of the calculator. The calculator’s predictions corresponded with their own perceptions of declining numbers of muskox bulls and suggested that reversal was possible under an alternative harvest scenario. As a result, the community members used the findings t...