How to Detect, Monitor, and Assess Population Change in Threatened Cryptic Mammal Species.

For biodiversity conservation to be successful, it needs to be based on scientific evidence (Sutherland et al., 2004). For species found in social-ecological systems, information is not only needed on population parameters (Partelow, 2018), but also on local human communities' makeups, attitudes towards the species, and interactions with the species (Watson et al., 2019). Western institutions and scientists are increasingly recognizing the value of local ecological knowledge in understanding species' distributions, local natural resource management and social norms, and cultural values relating to the ecosystem (e.g., Joa, Winkel and Primmer, 2018). Conservation evidence is hard to obtain for rare or elusive species (McKelvey, Aubry and Schwartz, 2008) like Geocapromys brownii. The elusive (Clough, 1976) and Endangered (Kennerley, Turvey and Young, 2018) rodent is endemic to Jamaica and a rare survivor of the worst post-glacial mammalian extinction (Turvey et al., 2017). The John Crow Mountains are a social-ecological system in which Maroons, Indigenous people of Jamaica, live (Kopytoff, 1976), and in which Geocapromys brownii is found (Robinson, 2020). Ecological, anthropological, and genomic approaches will be explored to understand coney population parameters and Maroon peoples' interactions with and opinions on the conservation of the species in the John Crow Mountains.