Comparé aux hommes, les femmes connaissent mieux les plantes comestibles et celles utilisées dans la pharmacopée et ont moins de connaissance sur les plantes utilisées dans la construction. Les données d'interview ont montré Research AbstractEthnobotanical studies often underestimate or misrepresent impacts of age and gender on individual ethnobotanical knowledge. This paper compares two common methodologies, participant observation and key-informant interviews, to examine the variation of ethnobotanical knowledge across age and gender in three communities in rural southwest Niger. We compared lists of plants mentioned in interviews as food, fodder, construction and medicine, to lists compiled from observations of daily activities. Compared to men, women reported more edible plants, different medicinal plants, and less detailed information on construction plants. Interview data indicated ethnobotanical knowledge increased with age. However, in observations youth ate a greater diversity of food plants and identified and ranked fodder species more quickly than adults. This paper supports previous research on age and gender effects on ethnobotanical knowledge and critiques common research methods and assumptions. We advocate for mixed-method approaches to gather more nuanced understandings of ethnobotanical knowledge. RésuméLes études, souvent sous-estiment ou présentent mal les impacts de l'âge et du genre sur la connaissance ethnobotanique individuelle. Cet article compare deux méthodes: l'observation et l'interview afin d'examiner la variation de la connaissance ethnobotanique en fonction de l'âge et du genre dans trois communautés rurales du sud-ouest du Niger. Nous avons comparé les listes des plantes utilisées dans l'alimentation, le fourrage, la construction et la pharmacopée, à l'issue de l'interview aux listes établies sur la base des observations d'activités quotidiennes.

There is a pressing need to find both locally and globally relevant tools to measure and compare biodiversity patterns. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is important to biodiversity monitoring, but has a contested role in preliminary biodiversity assessments. We examined rapid participatory rural appraisal (rPRA) (a tool commonly used for local needs assessments) as an alternative to surveys of vascular plants conducted by people with local knowledge. We used rPRA to determine the local-knowledge consensus on the average richness, diversity, and height of local grasses and trees in three habitats surrounding Boumba, Niger, bordering Park-W. We then conducted our own vascular plant surveys to collect information on plant richness, abundance, and structure. Using a qualitative ranking, we compared TEK-based assessments of diversity patterns with our survey-based assessments. The TEK-based assessments matched survey-based assessments on measures of height and density for grasses and trees and tree richness. The two assessments correlated poorly on herb richness and Simpson's D value for both trees and grasses. Plant life form and gender of the participant affected the way diversity patterns were described, which highlights the usefulness of TEK in explaining local realities and indicates limitations of using TEK as a large-scale assessment tool. Our results demonstrate that rPRA can serve to combine local-knowledge inquiry with scientific study at a cost lower than vascular plant surveys and demonstrates a useful blunt tool for preliminary biodiversity assessment.