Local knowledge should be the basis for scientific research, according to ecologist Douglas Sheil. “In ecological and scientific studies on nature conservation, the real problems are often not addressed”, says Irishman Douglas Sheil, a tropical ecologist from the Center of International Forestry Research in Bogor (Java). Sheil believes in a different approach which he has been putting into practice since 1995 in Malinau, a rugged and still largely forested sub-province of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo.
