Our ecological studies on large varanid lizards in a remote region of tropical Australia reveal a direct benefit to collaboration with local indigenous people. Although they worked together, in pairs, western scientists and indigenous rangers found lizards with different behavioral phenotypes (“personalities”). The resultant broader sampling of the lizard population enabled us to detect positive effects of a conservation management intervention. Those effects would not have been evident from the subset of animals collected by western scientists, and hence, involvement by researchers from both cultures critically affected our conclusions and paved the way for large‐scale deployment of a novel conservation initiative in Northern Australia.

中文翻译：

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敏锐的眼睛看到害羞的蜥蜴：与土著人民的合作可以改变保护研究的成果

我们对澳大利亚热带偏远地区的大型varanid蜥蜴进行的生态研究表明，与当地土著人民的合作将直接受益。尽管他们在一起工作，但西方科学家和土著护林员却成对地发现了蜥蜴具有不同的行为表型（“个性”）。结果，对蜥蜴种群进行了更广泛的采样，使我们能够发现保护管理干预措施的积极作用。从西方科学家收集的动物子集中不会明显看到这些影响，因此，两种文化的研究人员的参与都严重影响了我们的结论，并为在北澳大利亚大规模部署新的保护计划铺平了道路。