Human Dimensions of Pangolin Conservation: Indigenous and Local Knowledge, Ethnozoological Uses, and Willingness of Rural Communities to Enhance Pangolin Conservation in Nepal

Abstract

Understanding local knowledge about wildlife, local uses, and local people's willingness to support conservation activities are crucial factors in formulating wildlife conservation strategies. We conducted a semi-structured questionnaire survey of 1017 people from 105 villages located in different ecological regions across all seven Provinces of Nepal. We performed generalized linear mixed modeling (GLMM) to investigate the key drivers influencing respondents' knowledge about pangolins, based on a questionnaire score. We identified provinces, ethnicity, occupation, gender, and age group as strong predictors influencing local ecological knowledge about pangolins. The respondents from provinces in the western part of Nepal represented significantly lower knowledge scores than the respondents from the eastern and central provinces. Similarly, respondents belonging to non-Indigenous groups, students, females, and people aged between 18-30 years had the lowest knowledge scores about pangolins. A range of uses and beliefs about pangolins were reported across Nepal, and 48% of respondents believed that pangolin scales and meat were used for traditional medicines. The majority of respondents (71.1%) were willing to support pangolin conservation in their local areas. Our study suggests that awareness programs, alternative livelihood, and incomegenerating trainings for local communities could be helpful in enhancing the long-term conservation of pangolins in Nepal. Increased efforts are needed in western Nepal and across the country with non-Indigenous communities, females, young people, and students. Thus, this study offers an important baseline to help design and execute effective community-based conservation actions and management decisions for pangolin conservation.

Attitudes to pangolins and factors affecting their conservation in a human dominated landscape in Nepal

“…Attitude scores differed across topographical regions, provinces, levels of education and family size. Most previous studies on pangolins and conservation awareness initiatives were conducted by government and non‐government conservation agencies and were focused in Koshi Province and Bagmati Province in eastern and central Nepal along the Terai belt where attitudes towards pangolins tended to be positive (Suwal et al, 2020; Suwal et al, 2022). The negative attitudes towards pangolins among the respondents from Karnali Province in western Nepal were associated with lack of knowledge and the absence of conservation activities.…”

“…We substituted numerical codes for answers where possible or used the narrative responses as qualitative data (Kusi et al, 2020). Province, topography, gender, age group, family size, ethnic group, education level, and occupation were used as predictor variables, similar to Suwal et al (2022). We treated “village” identity as a random factor to account for spatial clustering of respondents.…”

Community-Based Workshops to Involve Rural Communities in Wildlife Management Case Study: Bighorn Sheep in Baja California, Mexico

“…This lack of knowledge is common in rural communities, where the information available about wildlife comes from the interactions and relationships that local people have with it [3]. Therefore, local knowledge focuses on the characteristics that are easier to observe and those that are more relevant to the use of wildlife species: uses, diet, distribution, breeding season, population trends, and threats [60][61][62][63].…”