Overview
A desktop site assessment can map tidal elevation and sediment type. It cannot tell you where the fishing grounds used to be before a mangrove stand died back. That knowledge lives with the people who have worked the coast for years.
Support a ProgrammeWhy Local Knowledge Is Essential to Coastal Restoration
Coastal ecosystems change over years and decades, and the people who fish, farm or gather along a coastline notice those changes long before they show up in satellite imagery or a formal survey.
field notes
Local Knowledge as Evidence:
- Local Knowledge as Data, Not Anecdote
Treating local knowledge as a courtesy consultation, rather than a genuine source of evidence, wastes the most detailed record available for many sites.
- What Community Memory Holds
Questions like why a particular stretch of mangrove died back, or when a seagrass meadow began thinning, often have answers that exist only in community memory.
- Where This Fits in Restoration Design
Local knowledge is most useful early, feeding directly into site assessment and restoration design, rather than gathered after a technical plan is already fixed.
- Part of the Evidence Base
This is why every one of Twende’s site assessments treats community input as part of the evidence base, not a separate outreach step layered on afterward.