McCarty, Connor, authorLynn, Stacy, advisorVogeler, Jody, committee memberSmith, Melinda, committee member2024-09-092024-09-092024https://hdl.handle.net/10217/239197Maasai are an Indigenous group native to the East African drylands who traditionally practice pastoralism, but their livelihoods are undergoing drastic changes as they become increasingly dependent on cultivation, adapt to climate change, and endure socio-political pressures, including for wildlife conservation. We wanted to understand Maasai communities' views on this landscape-level change using their Indigenous knowledge of plants as an indicator. In the first part of this research project, we asked members of five Maasai villages located in Tanzania's Simanjiro Plains about their experiences with problematic plants to identify and rank which plant species and plant characteristics they found to be most problematic from their perspective without influence from our team's biases. In the second part of the project, we introduced a participatory science tool, CitSci, into the community to collect geospatial data on these plants to created habitat suitability models for the three most problematic plants – Oltelemet (Ipomoea hildebrandtii), Alairahirah (Crotalaria polysperma), and Gugu caroti (Parthenium hysterophorus). Using quantitative and qualitative analyses, we evaluated participatory science's challenges and benefits in the community as a source of continuous engagement, collaboration, and local utility. This speaks to our greater goal: to embed two-eyed seeing in participatory social-ecological research. By utilizing both Indigenous knowledge and scientific tools from the Western scientific world, there is potential to improve academic research and help Indigenous researchers carry out locally focused and community-led projects without the oversight, influence, or harm from external forces common with Western-focused approaches. Using this project as an exploratory case study, our conceptual framework shows great promise.born digitalmasters thesesengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.Text