How to know a national park?
To confront the ongoing global ‘biodiversity crisis’ various international agreements have presented ambitious aims for the preservation and restoration of threatened ecosystems. Entwined with these aims, different categories of protected areas have long been seen as a key conservation tool. Yet to know if and how the designation and management of protected areas affect the status of vulnerable habitats and species requires regular, ongoing monitoring of such areas. Forming a particular form of knowledge production related to an issue of great social and political concern, monitoring as such has nevertheless received comparatively little (conceptual) attention in science and technology studies (STS). In this presentation, I therefore explore how particular scientific and cultural readings of nature are tied together to shape monitoring as a knowledge practice in the context of Neusiedler See – Seewinkel National Park in Austria. I present ethnographic data on different ecosystem and species-based monitoring programs to demonstrate how these generate particular forms of ecological knowledge across temporal and spatial scales. I will argue that the calibration of monitoring practices at particular places and times with broader framings of biodiversity do not only produce matters of fact on conservation in the national park, but also generate more complex narratives on the interweaving of nature and culture that shapes biodiversity’.
