Austin, Z., Cinderby, S., Smart, J., Raffaelli, D. & White, P. Mapping wildlife: integrating stakeholder knowledge with modelled patterns of deer abundance by using participatory GIS. Wildl. Res. 36, 553-564 (2009).

This paper reports on a study that sought to integrate stakeholders into the issue of wildlife management by involving them in the GIS process used to model deer abundance in the East of England.  In this study area, where feral deer populalations are viewed as a nuisance or danger by some and as a resource by others, it can be difficult to reach a concensuus on management plans.  This is made more difficult by incomplete records on species numbers and distributions throughout the area.  The researches employed a strategy of ‘participatory GIS’ to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of the demography of these deer populations and to ground truth the models they developed to estimate density and distribution based on reported traffic accidents.  The model was used to create abundance maps in ArcGIS 9, which were used in conjunction with stakeholder interviews to incorporate their local knowledge of deer occurrences  with the predictions of the model.  The study found this approach flawed because each interviewee had ‘expert’ knowledge of a limited physical area of the study site,but were prone to alter parts of the map that were outside of this range.  Thus those alterations could not reliably be used in their final mapping.  Hoevere, it was a good tool for evaluating what the limiting knowledge is in creating real-time occupancy maps for a far ranging species.  This paper is a good example of using GIS to integrate the public into wildlife research.  Also, it describes some good techniques for incorporating non-spatial data into GIS work.