“A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity,
stability and beauty of the community; and the community includes
the soil, water, fauna and flora, as well as the people.”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949).

The Changing Mekong Program primarily emphasizes scientific questions generated by local communities within the Mekong region. These questions serve as the basis for sets of alternative hypotheses that are tested using Strong Inference models following the collection of preliminary investigative data.

Local hypotheses about management of natural resources, changes in weather patterns and climate, conservation, and long-term relationships between humans and environments serve as initial models to be tested in applied experiments. Local community members will be engaged within this process as scientific partners in the research design, data collection, analysis and interpretation. Employing Strong Inference alternative hypotheses that are generated within communities, in collaboration with scientists, leads to outcomes and interpretations that are palatable to the community because they were generated within it.

Examples of local hypothesis subjects:

Best practices for

• sustainability
• profitability
• productivity

Biodiversity

• identification
• distribution
• management conservation

A key feature of the Changing Mekong Program is constant archiving and distribution of information as it is learned. This is accomplished through the establishment of knowledge networks that employ a combination of new information technologies. Information will be translated into each of the major national languages of participants in order to facilitate active discussion. Data distribution and translation is expected to be a substantial portion of each project.

The primary goal of the Changing Mekong Program research is to understand how people interact with plants and the environment across a wide range of scales and to do so in ways that interlock information scales. Through understanding how people interact with different scales of the environment we will be able to evaluate and propose policies regarding:

• global climate change
• changing investments in natural resource management
• conservation priorities within conservation priority areas.

While the specific details of research are not laid out here, it is expected that most projects will result in:

• improved scientific models of the impacts of regional climate change
• specific knowledge of the identification and distributions of biodiversity suitable for making decisions about resource management
• specific data about human cultural interactions with plants and ecosystems that will be useful for understanding biocultural diversity and better appreciating cultural and biological diversity in the region.