- Both scientific and traditional knowledge are indispensable to effective, ethical, and community-centered conservation, the director of Snow Leopard Trust argues in a new op-ed.
- “When communities, scientists, and conservation practitioners become co-producers of knowledge, science and stewardship become stronger, and so does the future of nature,” he writes.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
A group of women often climbs steep cliffs to set up camera traps for snow leopards around Kibber in Spiti Valley, India. The senior women know the landscape intimately, like what areas the animals use and where cameras are likely to capture movement. They have walked these mountains all their lives and know how to navigate the most rugged and inaccessible terrain safely, even in snow and ice. This is a kind of access that visiting researchers simply cannot replicate.
Back at the village, they gather around two computer screens. The younger women, who are typically more adept at handling technology, organize and sort the photographic data. Together, they identify individual snow leopards from their coat patterns, building scientific monitoring skills over time. Their work contributes directly to regional and global assessment and monitoring of snow leopard populations.
Who are these scientists conducting camera-trap monitoring of snow leopards? They are not trained researchers. They are women from the Indigenous community of Kibber in Spiti Valley. This work is done alongside their other chores: Livestock rearing, farming, household responsibilities, and community work. They do this, because they are interested in knowing how many snow leopards they are helping protect on their community lands; they take pride in learning research techniques; and they see themselves as part of the global effort to study and protect them.
Lobzang Yangchen, the coordinator of the Kibber team of 11 women, says, “I started as a volunteer because I was curious about snow leopards. Now it has become my livelihood. There isn’t much else to do during winters, so this is when we do the camera trapping work.”
Research becomes community stewardship
These women work alongside trained researchers and conservation practitioners in a genuine partnership. Their community has spent decades building conservation initiatives. When research showed that wild herbivore populations were kept low by limited availability of forage, they set aside more than 35 square kilometers (13.5 square miles) of pasture — over 20% of their total land — as a livestock-free reserve. As a result, populations of blue sheep, the snow leopard’s primary wild prey, are now five times greater than before.
Retaliatory killing of snow leopards and wolves, once common, ended in the late 1990s as the partnership between the community and conservation practitioners deepened. Predator sightings became more common. Together, they co-created community livestock insurance, predator-proofed the village’s corrals, and developed income sources through conservation-linked handicrafts. Taking advantage of increased snow leopard sightings, the community demonstrated remarkable enterprise by partnering with tourism companies to develop winter wildlife tourism, transforming an otherwise quiet season into a thriving three-month annual enterprise.
Thirty years ago, snow leopards and wolves were rarely seen, and when they were, they were often killed. These efforts, built over three decades, have transformed the region into one of the best places in the world to see and photograph snow leopards. Where there was once almost no winter economy, between 350 and 550 tourists now visit this village of 80 households each winter specifically to see snow leopards, staying in community homestays, hiring local guides, and buying locally made goods.
Different kinds of knowledge
For these women and this community, ‘research’ is as much a part of conservation as it is part of community work. In this beautiful conflation, the traditional knowledge of senior women is complemented by the technological skills of younger women and the scientific skills of trained researchers to produce a remarkable conservation, research, and monitoring program. Traditional knowledge helps answer questions that science cannot.
Scientific tools allow communities and conservationists to answer questions that traditional knowledge cannot. Experienced community members contribute landscape and ecological knowledge accumulated over generations; younger community members bring technological skills; researchers contribute scientific methods, analytical approaches, and broader conservation perspectives. Together they generate knowledge and accumulate wisdom that none could produce independently.
Women from several other communities in the region have started similar monitoring efforts on their lands, with 30 more women trained across four neighboring villages: Demul, Chicham, Maney Yongma and Maney Gongma. Chhering Lanzon, one of the newer leopard monitors describes her own experience: “I have only been to primary school, so I was not sure if I would be able to use a computer. I started by knowing what a keyboard is, what a mouse is, and now I enjoy classifying animal images from the camera traps.”
Goodwill alone is not enough
The depth of this transformation did not happen through goodwill alone. Decades ago, a snow leopard walked into a corral in Kibber and killed dozens of livestock in a single night. The next morning, the angry villagers beat it to death. Their anger lingered as a ritual, as whoever walked past struck the carcass with a stick, abusing the long-dead cat.
Yet, a few years ago, when an old snow leopard strayed near the village, the community helped care for it, and when it eventually passed away, they gave it a respectful funeral.
This did not happen by accident.
Ethical and effective nature conservation requires genuine and long-term community engagement; conflict mitigation and conservation initiatives; livelihood and well-being initiatives; community leadership; supportive laws and policies; and participatory monitoring and adaptive management. It also requires protecting community ownership of the outcomes.
When Kibber’s conservation efforts were recognized with a Wildlife and Tourism Initiative Award, considerable behind-the-scenes work ensured the award went to the rightful local community recipients, rather than to a distant, more powerful agency. All these efforts must be founded on continuously developing knowledge, learning, and adaptive management.
Goodwill and good intentions, however sincere, are insufficient on their own. Conservation that is not grounded in the knowledge communities hold, and the knowledge that rigorous research produces, is conservation that cannot learn from itself, cannot adapt, and cannot earn the sustained trust of the people whose lands it depends on.
How science can reshape conservation policy
GPS collaring research of snow leopards fundamentally changed our understanding of their ecology. Their home range requirements proved to be far larger than was previously believed: Six to 44 times bigger. It showed that most protected areas are too small to hold even small populations of snow leopards, let alone viable ones: 40% of protected areas in the snow leopard range are too small to support even a single breeding pair; just 3 to 13% are large enough to contain a small population of 15 breeding females.
Informed by such knowledge, governments of snow leopard range countries shifted focus to protection of snow leopards across large, multiple-use landscapes well beyond protected area boundaries. This shift placed communities, and not just protected areas, at the center of national conservation strategies. Science did not replace community. It revealed how indispensable community is.
So, our Snow Leopard Trust (SLT) country teams work with a growing number of communities, currently 178, across multiple countries, to support community-embedded conservation programs similar to the one in Kibber through long-term partnerships. In the same spirit, we also work closely with the governments of all 12 snow leopard range countries through an intergovernmental alliance to advance ethical, community-centered and knowledge-led conservation policies.
Science strengthened community action in Mongolia
The establishment of the 8,000 square kilometer (just over 3,000 square miles) Tost Nature Reserve in Mongolia – an area almost the size of Puerto Rico – is a classic example of the value of scientific knowledge for community conservation leadership. This entire region within South Gobi province had been destined for large-scale mining. Exploration licenses had been given out for almost the entire area. Fortunately, GPS collaring and intensive camera trapping over the previous couple of years had established a strong baseline of scientific evidence regarding the biodiversity value of this region.
The community movement to protect their traditional lands from imminent destruction due to mining relied heavily on this scientific knowledge, as it did on a strong partnership with SLT’s science-driven, community-focused, and the women-led country partner, the Snow Leopard Conservation Foundation (SLCF). It took six years of collective effort, but finally in 2016, the Tost-Tosonbumba State Nature Reserve was established and is co-managed today by the local community, the state administration and SLCF.
Amara, a livestock herder and conservation leader from the local community in Tost, reflected on this remarkable conservation and community success, saying “The snow leopard has saved our land.”
Separating research and conservation is costly
Lobzang Yangchen’s spirit and hunger to learn perhaps reflects a broader theme about why research and learning must be seen as integral to community-centered conservation.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to study further, but that did not happen,” she says. “Now, thanks to this work, I have learned to use computers, and work on them every day. Sometimes I make mistakes, but then I ask my colleagues, and fix them.”
Conservation that becomes disconnected from learning risks relying on false assumptions that can lead to mistakes with little scope to fix them. If knowledge, learning and sharing become divorced from community conservation, opportunities are lost, for biodiversity and for the communities themselves.
On the other hand, when communities, scientists, and conservation practitioners become co-producers of knowledge, science and stewardship become stronger, and so does the future of nature.
Charudutt Mishra is executive director at Snow Leopard Trust.
Banner image: A collared Snow Leopard in Mongolia. Image courtesy of Snow Leopard Trust-SLCF.
See related coverage:
Community more crucial than snow leopard counting: Interview with Rodney Jackson
Cite this article
Charudutt Mishra (2026). Scientific & traditional knowledge are key for effective & community-centered conservation (commentary). Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-324063Credits
