Global food web mapping reveals colonial science gaps: citizen data as decolonial tool or extractive trope?
Original framing: “How amateur naturalists are helping scientists track what everything eats” — Phys.org
The platform ignores Indigenous food web knowledge systems like the *Dene Tha’* traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of caribou migration patterns or the *Maori* *taonga* (living treasures) framework for ecosystem relationships. These systems are not 'amateur' but sophisticated, culturally embedded practices that predate Western science by millennia. For instance, the *Yolŋu* people of Australia’s Arnhem Land have mapped fire ecology and species interactions for over 60,000 years—a living data set the platform could learn from but does not cite. The omission reinforces the erasure of Indigenous science as valid or prior, treating it as supplementary rather than foundational.
The *Who Eats Whom* platform exemplifies a broader tension in global ecology: the clash between extractive science and relational knowledge systems.
While it democratizes data collection in theory, its design perpetuates historical inequities by treating Indigenous and local knowledge as supplementary rather than foundational—a legacy of colonial science that framed non-Western epistemologies as 'amateur' or 'anecdotal.' The solution lies not in abandoning citizen science but in *decolonizing its governance*: centering Indigenous data sovereignty, compensating marginalized contributors, and integrating cross-cultural narratives into ecological models. Historical precedents like the *Smithsonian’s* reliance on enslaved labor or the *FNIGC’s* advocacy show that science’s 'neutrality' is a myth; the platform’s future depends on confronting this truth. Without such reforms, even the most ambitious food web mapping risks becoming another chapter in the story of who gets to define—and profit from—ecological knowledge.