Actions | A Holistic Approach #

The majority of our members, and the lifeblood of our work, are paraecologists: members of local villages trained and employed as researchers and community organizers. Paraecologists have been collecting a diverse suite of social-ecological data in 20 villages since 2015. These researchers quantify bushmeat abundance and use, and with the help of their communities they co-produce a dataset novel in its scale, resolution, and application to local wildlife management. Paraecologists also work with hundreds of participating hunters using simple GPS technology to map hunts.

This work is an iterative, ongoing process: villages come together to create and adapt their own hunting and wildlife management through extensive community meetings, leveraging the data they collect to inform their decisions and actions.

Read more in our publications or explore data yourself.

Villages use the data and maps collected to actively plan and participate in co-management with regional institutions - be it a neighbouring national park or a logging company cutting timber in their backyard - to enable recognition of their land use and local monitoring of the forest. This collaboration is vital to mitigate threats from illegal activity by outsiders.

NADA closely collaborates with the Gabonese government, integrating successes and lessons learned into national policy. We facilitate and promote direct exchange on just sustainability between communities and federal decision-makers, and engage in long-term technical collaboration on specific policy with the government. Currently, NADA is working with the Research Institute for Tropical Ecology (IRET), the National Parks Agency (ANPN), and the Ministry of Forestry. See collaborators for more.

Recognizing similar urgent action is required in many tropical rainforest regions across the planet, NADA integrates successes and lessons learned into international discourse, from publishing papers in scientific journals, providing information to storytellers in international media, to collaboration with NGOs and decolonial conservation movements around the world.