Integration of Fishers’ Knowledge into Research on a Large Tropical River Basin, the Mekong River in Southeast Asia

The Mekong River is home to an estimated 1,200 species of fish and supports one of the most important freshwater fisheries in the world, vital for food security and employment among the 60 million people in the Mekong Basin. Many of the fish migrate seasonally between flood-season feeding, spawning and rearing habitats, and dryseason refuge habitats. Only limited, fragmented, information on these movements is available for individual species. Much more information is urgently needed in order to include such information into future development plans for the river basin. In order to start filling this knowledge gap, a survey of local fishers’ knowledge was carried out. More than 350 local fishers along the Mekong were interviewed about the migratory and reproductive habits of 50 important fish species and the distribution ranges for another 120 species. Interviews covered a stretch of almost 2,500 km extending through four countries. By merging data from different areas, migration patterns for 50 species were produced. We were also able to divide the Mekong into three distinct, but inter-connected regions, based on the pooling of the migration data. Further to this, the research produced considerable information on certain important fish habitats. Interviews revealed, for example, the role of deep pools within the Mekong mainstream. These appear to be very important dry season habitats for many species. Although this was not included as a specific subject during the interviews, fishers volunteered more than 230 records on the importance of the deep pool habitat. Our research demonstrates how fishers’ knowledge can provide information that is vital for management, and help develop hypotheses that focus future research. INTRODUCTION This conference is the latest evidence that local ecological knowledge has finally entered into the mainstream of fisheries research and management. We have now reached a point where it should no longer be needed to argue for the use of local knowledge but instead aim for its wider integration into research programmes and management strategies. The diversity of presentations on offer at the conference also reflects the diversity of issues and scales at which local knowledge has a role to play. This diversity will likely increase in the future as more fisheries researchers and managers embrace local knowledge in their activities. In this paper, I will focus on the role that local fishers’ knowledge has recently played in a research programme in the context of a large river basin, the Mekong River, in Southeast Asia. During the past three years, ecological studies, with emphasis on fish migrations, have been carried out as a joint effort between the four countries of the lower Mekong Basin: Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam1. These studies were based entirely on the systematic compilation of local ecological knowledge throughout the lower part of the Basin. I will use a few key results to demonstrate how local knowledge can provide information at several scales. Not only can it provide a wealth of detailed and site-specific information at local scale, but by merging data from different places, crucial information at the regional, and sometimes ecosystem, scale can also be obtained. For a large system like the Mekong Basin, where it is almost impossible to obtain relevant largescale ecosystem information based on conventional ecological research, this is perhaps the most promising result of this study.