| In collaboration with two communities living in, and on the edge of, Gorongosa National Park (GNP), Mozambique, we researched the importance of different landscape units to these communities and used the information to develop a management plan for GNP. We conceived the importance of a landscape to local people as a ratio of the benefits they derive from it and the costs of accessing or using those benefits. To test this expectation, we developed Bayesian belief models, for which the parameters were the relative preference weightings derived from community members (the relative preferences for benefits and relative expectations of costs). We then collected field data to confront the models for each of the two sites. In a parallel process, we conducted a... |
