Opportunities to integrate herders’ indicators into formal rangeland monitoring: an example from Mongolia

Despite increasing calls for knowledge integration around the world, traditional knowledge is rarely used in formal, Western science-based monitoring and resource management. To better understand indicators herders use and their relationship to researcher-measured indicators, we conducted in-depth field interviews with 26 herders in three ecological zones of Mongolia. We asked each herder to 1) assess the overall condition of three different sites located along a livestock-use gradient from their winter camp using a numeric scale, 2) describe the indicators they used in their assessment, and 3) explain what caused their pastures to remain healthy or become degraded. At each site, we collected field data on vegetation variables and compared these with herders’ ratings and indicators using linear regression. We used classification and ordination to understand how herders’ assessment scores related to plant community composition, and determine how well multivariate analysis of factors dete...