Early one morning, a small group of Fijian villagers gathers on the beach. In front of them are the mudflats, mangroves, and coral reefs that make up their qoliqoli-their traditional community-owned fishing grounds that have sustained their village for generations. From a distance, they look just like other groups in the past that have gone out to harvest resources. But this group is carrying compasses, tape measures, metal quadrat frames, and clipboards. They are not going fishing. Instead, they are harvesting data to monitor the community-managed marine protected area that their village has established.Too often, monitoring seems to be relegated to outside scientists who collect only data that interest them or complex data that cannot be used by resource managers and users. If there is one thing we have learned from our work in Fiji, it is that not only can communities do good monitoring, but also, ultimately, involving the community in monitoring leads to conservation success in all sorts of unanticipated ways.
The Ucunivanua ProjectOur story begins in the early 1990s when residents of Ucunivanua village realized that the marine resources they depended on were becoming scarce. One example was the kaikoso, a clam found in the shallow mudflats and seagrass beds. Elders of the village remembered how in the past, a woman could go out and in a few short hours, collect several bags of large kaikoso for her family or market sale. Now, however, a woman could spend all day on the mudflats and end up with only half a bag of small clams.About this time, we and other colleagues from the University of the South Pacific and the Biodiversity Conservation Network began a conservation project with the Ucunivanua community. In our planning meetings with the community, one problem that came up over and over again was the dwindling stocks of marine resources. One solution the community identified was to return to their traditional management practice of setting up tabu areas-regions of the qoliqoli that were temporarily closed to fishing. The community decided to experiment by setting up a 24-hectare tabu area on the mudflat and seagrass bed directly in front of the village in the hope that it would lead to increased clam harvests in the adjacent downcurrent areas.The community appointed 20 men and women to be on the tabu area management team. The team first staked out the boundaries of the proposed protected area. They then worked with the paramount chief and elders of the village to hold a traditional ceremony declaring the area tabu for the following three years.While the tabu area was being set up, we worked with the management team to develop and implement simple monitoring methods. Using pictures, stories, and examples, we discussed the theory of monitoring and the basic ideas of sampling and statistics. The team then practiced line transects, first on dry land and then in the water. They selected a random compass bearing within both tabu and non-tabu areas, laid out a tape measure, and then sampled the number of clams with...
