Copyright © 2011 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance. Reid, K. A., K. J. H. Williams, and M. S. Paine. 2011. Hybrid knowledge: place, practice, and knowing in a volunteer ecological restoration project. Ecology and Society 16(3): 19. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-04234-160319 Research Hybrid Knowledge: Place, Practice, and Knowing in a Volunteer Ecological Restoration Project Karen A. Reid 1 , Kathryn J H Williams 1 , and Mark S. Paine 1,2 ABSTRACT. Wide community participation in ecological restoration projects is encouraged because of the multiple values generated. However, it is often assumed that volunteer projects cannot contribute to the production of generalizable ecological knowledge because they are locally focused and don’t follow scientific protocols or ecological theory. Anecdotally, the many successful volunteer projects suggest that some amateurs possess insight that could benefit restoration ecology generally, but the processes of generating, testing, and sharing local restoration knowledge remains poorly understood. This ethnographic study of the volunteer restorationist organization, Friends of Organ Pipes National Park, in Victoria, Australia, explores local ecological knowledge generation. Our results suggest that there are similarities between amateurs’ knowledge practices and traditional ecological knowledge such as extended apprenticeships, narratives, and the importance of experience of place. There are also similarities with practices of science, for example, semistructured planning, monitoring, evaluating, and documenting observations. We conclude that the ways amateurs generate, share, and test knowledge are complex and dynamic, producing a kind of hybrid between local and scientific knowledge. Key Words: community-based ecological restoration; ecological knowledge; ecological restoration practice; place-based knowledge; traditional ecological knowledge INTRODUCTION One of the strengths of ecological restoration as a landscape management practice is its capacity to engage people from all sectors of the community. Arguably ecological restoration was, from its beginnings, practice-oriented and carried out largely by amateurs on a volunteer basis (Gross 2002). Ecologically and socioeconomically, restoration is a practice that accelerates recovery of damaged or degraded ecosystems and therefore recovery of ecosystem services. Culturally, ecological restoration promises to renew the human relationship with nature, through personal fulfillment and shared experience and meaning making (Clewell and Aronson 2007). Wide community participation in the practice has been encouraged for all these reasons, and to build strong community commitment to restoration projects (Higgs 2003). However, participation by lay members of the public can also be perceived as a weakness. Volunteer-based projects are often considered to be locally specific and therefore lacking potential to contribute significantly to catchment or landscape-scale outcomes, or to the production of valid and generalizable knowledge (Lake 2001, Palmer et al. 2006, Clewell and Aronson 2007). There is speculation about whether practitioners follow ecological principles in regard to application of theory to goal setting and practice (Hobbs and Norton 1996). Further, it is thought that many practitioners fail to follow scientific practices of hypothesis testing by experiments, or protocols of monitoring and reporting. Nevertheless, as Hobbs (2006) observes, many local projects are successful, which suggests that some practitioners possess considerable insight from which restoration ecologists should endeavor to learn. Much is known, or at least assumed, about how scientific knowledge is generated, but to date there have been few empirical studies into the processes by which local ecological restoration knowledge is generated, tested, and shared among participants. In this paper, we describe research conducted to explore these processes of knowledge production. 1 University of Melbourne, 2 Dairy New Zealand