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community protocol, you may wish to include the following main types of information, among others:
relationships with and impacts on the environment and different types of resources; territorial
boundaries; connections between ecosystems or other communities’ territories or areas; unique values
and roles of certain resources; totem species or taboos; land use change and resource use trends over
time; and visions and plans for resource management and conservation.
General Environment and Natural Resources
What types of natural resources do you use? What are they used for?
Which are most important to your community? Why?
What are the main cycles (for example, seasonal, temporal, cultural, or spiritual)?
Where are they?
How are they used and managed? Who is involved?
What types of customary laws or values regulate the management of different resources?
What traditional knowledge, innovations and practices are involved?
COMMUNITY EXPERIENCE:
Developing Tribal Biodiversity Registers as the Basis for Tribal Biocultural Protocols in Iran
Resource: Adapted from material provided by CENESTA
Figure 13: The Qashqai tribe has extensive knowledge of the high biodiversity in the rangelands of their territory
(Courtesy: Samira Farahani, CENESTA)
Iran has approximately 700 tribes of Indigenous nomadic pastoralists. Most are engaged in vertical
migration over their ancestral territories, including summering grounds in the highlands, wintering
grounds in the lowlands, and the migratory routes and resting stops connecting the two. About a dozen
tribes recently decided to develop tribal biocultural protocols in order to protect themselves from
unwanted outsiders taking resources, particularly highly valuable medicinal plants, from their territories
without their consent.
The tribes initially set out to describe the diversity of their domesticated livestock, including sheep,
goats, camels, horses, cattle, and donkeys. They soon decided that it was first necessary to collect and
identify the hundreds of plant species that provide the foundation for their livestock and livelihoods.
With the support of professional botanists, they found that many of the plants species, perhaps up to 20
per cent, were unknown to science. However, the tribal elders knew them and their properties, names,
and many uses such as food, medicine, livestock feed, or industry. They decided to elaborate tribal