India, Dec. 21 -- "Earlier, one could find pangolins near the village. But not anymore," says Odan Ratan of the Adi community, an Indigenous people from the Siang river basin in Arunachal Pradesh. Ratan, who hails from Damro village in the Upper Siang district, works as a field collaborator with the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), a wildlife conservation and research organisation based in Mysore, Karnataka. He is part of a project to study the critically endangered Chinese pangolin in Arunachal Pradesh.

In a recent short paper published in the Oryx journal, NCF researchers including Ratan demonstrate improved camera trap capture rates of pangolins in the region when the traditional knowledge of the Adi people was utilised.

Pangoli...