Weaving knowledges to support wildlife health surveillance in Kenya's pastoral rangelands

In wildlife-livestock-human interfaces, pathogens capable of spreading between wild and domestic animals and humans have important implications for conservation outcomes, economics, and public health. Robust wildlife health surveillance can help address these risks. However, capacity and resource constraints hinder effective wildlife health surveillance at regional and national scales, particularly in lower- and middle-income countries. We examined how collaboration between Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) and wildlife health professionals may support the identification and mitigation of animal and zoonotic disease risks in remote and rural areas where wildlife surveillance remains underresourced. In the pastoral rangelands of Laikipia, Kenya, we completed interviews, focus group discussions, and elicitation methods from April 2023 to May 2024 to determine how Maasai pastoralists (n = 57) and trained animal health professionals (n = 10) understood wildlife health. Pastoralists held extensive place-based knowledge of wildlife health and disease, including knowledge of clinical symptoms, species affected, transmission routes, and trends that complemented, deepened, and extended the same knowledge held by trained animal health professionals. Our results suggest that combining IPLCs' and animal health professionals' knowledge can benefit wildlife health surveillance by enhancing surveillance efforts, furthering mutual learning about emerging or reemerging disease, providing new understanding of disease dynamics, and, more broadly, decolonizing conservation knowledge. Two practical ways IPLCs' knowledge could be included and availed to strengthen wildlife health surveillance and research include use of community-led wildlife health surveillance and research and incorporation of ethnoveterinary training in formal wildlife veterinary curricula. However, precautions must be taken to ensure equitable distribution of benefits arising from knowledge sharing and to safeguard against the appropriation of knowledge associated with animal health and disease.