traditional ecological knowledge

Photography of flora during transect walks in the summer 2014 field season was collected to create the flipbooks for interviews on TEK. These interviews will allow us to understand how to quantify levels of TEK. The creation of these flipbooks will meet the request of the director of the school in Ek’Balam, one of the communities in the municipality of Temozón. The director observed that while children were able to conceptualize a spatial representation of their town, they had a more difficult time conceptualizing the surrounding forests. We speculated that children whose families no longer used their land would not have the opportunity to gain the TEK that their parents possess. The creation of visual plant identification guides will be a way for the teachers in this and other local communities to help students maintain this knowledge. Students will be a part of creating botany field guides that are specific to their surroundings. These guides will then be incorporated into the curriculum. The footage will be used to create a short film that will be an instructive to other communities interested in implementing similar projects in their own towns and surrounding forest and agricultural areas.