Local ecological knowledge and socio-economic factors influencing farmers' management decisions in jungle rubber agroforestry systems in Jambi, Indonesia

There is general consensus among development people about the recognition and use of local knowledge and practices in development initiatives aimed at technology development by and for rural farming communities. Interest amongst research, education and development institutions to investigate and document local knowledge has grown significantly over the last few years. The University of Wales, Bangor is a leading institution in the development of a knowledge-based systems (KBS) methodology to acquire and use local knowledge in research and development. The university spearheaded the development of this novel approach to acquire, store and use local ecological knowledge about agro-ecosystems in collaboration with various national and international research institutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It promotes systematic collection and collation of ecological knowledge from farmers and development professionals. The Agro-ecological Knowledge Toolkit (AKT5) is a tailor-made computer software that enables representation of statements of knowledge in a computer readable form, allowing exploration of local ecological knowledge using computer based search and reasoning facilities. Work so far has revealed that farmers in general have sophisticated knowledge of ecological processes occurring in farming systems and that the local knowledge they possess is largely complementary to scientific knowledge, but is not taken into account when planning research. While knowledge differs to some extent between communities, a common framework and terminology occur across large distances.

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