Mobilizing Knowledge for Integrated Ecosystem Assessments

1999). Researchers, natural resource managers, and environmental practitioners face a number of challenges, including how to deal with information “fuzziness,” how to reconcile seemingly contradictory data, how to smooth over geographic and spatial variability or “lumpiness,” and how to consolidate information gathered at different spatial scales. One proposed solution has been to amalgamate different types of knowledge, such as by working across disciplines, combining qualitative and quantitative information, and linking formal and local knowledge in a complementary manner. But this approach is no panacea for ecosystem assessments involving complex systems, and new challenges arise when attempts are made to combine knowledge in this way. The techniques to combine different forms of knowledge and data from disparate sources, different spatial scales, and indeed different worldviews are neither well developed nor validated. The Southern African Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (SAfMA, http://www.maweb.org) was undertaken at a variety of spatial scales, from the regional (with sub-Saharan Africa as the assessment area) to the local (at the scale of a village, single protected area, or microwatershed). Each of these scales had its own stakeholders and thus its own key topics of concern. These in turn defined the information needs for the assessment at that scale. We found that as the scale of assessment moved from regional to local, so the balance of information availability shifted from formal, documented data, typically Chapter 9