Efforts to document and assess traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) have grown exponentially in recent decades, stimulated by the concomitant rise in its perceived value. This reappraisal is a direct consequence of global environmental and social change as well as manifold threats to the survival and integrity of indigenous peoples and their cultural heritages around the world.The locally-distinctive systems of knowledge, belief and practice held by small-scale indigenous societies or distinctive sociocultural segments within more complex societies contain a wealth of basic and practical information about the natural world, its components and relationships among them.

For many impoverished groups, this aboriginal or folk wisdom constitutes the main economic asset that they control. Conservation scientists have emphasized the important contribution that TEK makes to biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Yet many observers, including local groups themselves, have expressed concerns that slowly accumulated, locally adapted knowledge is disappearing or declining at an alarming rate and therefore pro-active measures are needed to preserve and protect it. Although it is possible to point to a number of policy vehicles enacted at international, national, and lower levels which are aimed at reinforcing or reviving TEK, it remains very unclear and unknown what overall impact, if any, these have really made. The development of TEK indicators represents the most recent chapter in the search for more effective policies. Such indicators are intended to identify and measure key components of TEK and thereby provide a clear and systematic basis for tracking changes over time.

The present study was made in an attempt to contribute something to this exploratory enterprise of developing reliable indicators of TEK. In this report, we describe and justify a robust yet practical methodology for collecting and analyzing data leading to the creation of a locally-appropriate, globally-applicable indicator focused on trends of retention or loss of TEK over time. The proposed index, which we call the VITEK (acronym for "Vitality Index of Traditional Environmental Knowledge"), will be the first of its kind. It will focus on rating the vitality status of TEK (i.e. inferrable trends of retention or loss over time) within selected groups and allow for relative comparisons of that status among groups at different scales of inclusiveness. Another intended feature is to measure the vitality status of different semantic/behavioral domains within the rubric of TEK in order to identify which types of knowledge are most vulnerable to change. The report includes a comprehensive literature review and evaluation of methods that have been used to measure different aspects of traditional knowledge as well as a synthesis of the major findings from studies of TEK variation and change. Using this body of work as precedent, we then formulate a protocol for making a quantitative assessment of the vitality of traditional knowledge at the local level (i.e. community or group of related communities) and representing the trend pattern in a statistical form for comparative purposes. We begin this report by summarizing why TEK is valuable and worthy of protection and how the VITEK can contribute to this goal.
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