Community-sourced knowledge improves biodiversity monitoring in Madagascar’s National Parks

Local community members can contribute to biodiversity conservation, especially for rural yet critically biodiverse locations such as in Southern Madagascar. While collaborations with local communities were initiated by Madagascar National Parks (MNP) in 1996 to build local support for protected area management, such community-based approaches to monitoring biodiversity were underdeveloped, and to date their efficacy has not been studied. The objective of our study was to develop community-based monitoring of vertebrate biodiversity within six protected areas in Madagascar, and to assess whether the data recorded by local communities can be used for the monitoring of protected areas spanning dry to wet tropical rainforest ecosystems. We implemented a training program for each local community and validated community observations via surveys performed by professional scientists with taxonomic expertise. Across two years of surveys and six protected areas, scientists observed more species per survey (9.04) than community members (6.09). Yet collectively, community members observed more species (373) than scientists (354). Furthermore via multivariate modeling, we found that whether a biodiversity monitoring team was composed of scientists or community members had a non-significant effect on the number of species observed, which was more sensitive to the vegetation and climate of a location. Our study suggests that for biodiversity monitoring in Madagascar, professional scientists are likely more efficient, yet with sufficient survey effort, local community members can provide comparable estimates of species richness. We discuss the benefits and limits of incorporating community-based monitoring into surveys of vertebrate biodiversity in speciose tropical systems.