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This website started in March 2012. Please excuse if many pages are still empty. Content will be added nearly every day from now on. This website has been initiated by the 20 participants (para-ecologists and project coordinators) of an international workshop on para-ecologist initiatives which was in Hamburg in June 2011. The workshop was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The website is a platform for para-ecologists worldwide as well as for projects, organisations or individuals that are involved in the capacity development of para-ecologists. The platform aims to facilitate the networking and sharing of information within the para-ecologist community but also inform the public about the concepts, aims and methodology of para-ecologist programmes. For the website, we stick to the term para-ecologist. With this term, we explicitly also refer to para-taxonomists, biodiversity facilitators and other terms that have created in this context. Para-ecologists are members of local communities that do not have academic background but are trained in the field of ecology, taxonomy or socio-ecology, sociology, anthropology or related fields and are employed to actively support research or development activities in their environment. The main objectives of para-ecologist approaches are Enhancement of communication between land users and scientists for mutual learning: Integration of local knowledge into research as well as empowerment of land users to understand, use and implement scientific results in agriculture and forestry Environmental education and sensitization (to develop awareness, win hearts, change minds) Improvement of relationships between conservation areas and local communities Improvement of livelihoods through development, capacity development and alternative incomes Creation of job opportunities; also through the assessment of alternative sources of community livelihoods and capacity development (e.g. training of tour guides) Make basic research more efficient (e.g. biodiversity assessment, collection and documentation of organisms, monitoring of biodiversity or livelihood conditions etc.) Allow research activities and data collection also during absence of the scientists

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