Conservation in tropical forests: too fast, too furious? Improving legacy, collaboration, and ethical local participation in parrot species monitoring

Cockpit Country is a dense, hilly rainforest in the uplands of west-central Jamaica. So inaccessible is its terrain that for centuries it protected the Maroons from (re)capture by the British during the Transatlantic slave trade. The "green armour" also protects the many rare bird, amphibian, and bat species native to Jamaica, many of which can only be found in Cockpit Country. The inaccessibility has heavily impacted the emergence of forest conservation in Jamaica. Large swathes of the forest remain uncharted; satellite imagery is made redundant by the heavy blanket of canopy cover. The dense, uneven, unnavigable terrain also renders useless other technologies upon which modern conservation relies. There is little flight path available for drones, there is no internet available for remote uploads, GPS trackers are difficult to install because nests and breeding grounds are largely unknown and often abandoned between - even during - breeding seasons, and camera traps yield little because the species are small and/or poorly detectable.

The few Western researchers drawn to the region in search of rare birds or frogs typically undertake standalone projects that are necessarily manual and, consequently, difficult; many declare species as threatened and do not return. Such research makes no use of local knowledge held by clandestine traditional villages, whose expertise provides critical clues for the distribution of these species across an otherwise impenetrable landscape. It also omits prior investigations undertaken by local NGOs, able to make available a patchwork of clues indicating population trends, emerging threats, and environmental shifts. It also does not involve the state departments who inherit the task of synthesising these global assessments and calls for increased species protection into national policy, for which they are underfunded and because of which they are untrusted.

My doctoral research reframed traditional knowledge - now sought-after in mainstream conservation - not as widespread or communal, but as the result of exclusive, hierarchical, gendered activities. The very actions that soil clothes, muddy boots, and harden hands also create cultural divisions. Males from wealthier or larger households, with greater accumulated resources, have little responsibility within household division of labour, affording them the time and means to engage in traditional practices; those from smaller/poorer households reliant on wage labour are less able to access cultural activities. Ironically, the community participation often demanded by funding bodies, further verticalizes communities, as traditional practitioners become local experts, research assistants, and project consultants, while conservation outcomes restrict unsanctioned access by everyone else.

The aims of this fellowship are threefold. The first is to disseminate the findings of my PhD across academic circles, where there is a growing consensus on the importance of local participation in conservation research, with scant attention paid to its social, political, and economic consequences. This includes the proposal of a monograph that details the precarious and fragile traditions maintained by fewer than 1% of the population of the last remaining Maroon village in the entire Cockpit Country forest - a region encompassing more than 10% of Jamaica's landmass and supporting over 90% of its endemic terrestrial species. The second is to continue to provide open-access data (maps, environmental data, species population data) and documentation of traditional knowledge (using blogs, photographs, video) on a dedicated website co-produced with the Maroon community (www.countermappingcockpit.com). The third is to research different (low and high tech) methodologies that enable greater, more ethical participation by stakeholder groups into the monitoring of the now-Endangered black-billed parrot and operationalise findings across conservation networks.