Abstract
Mayotte Island in the Mozambique Channel holds 735 hectares of mangroves, occupying 29% of the coastline. In 2011, the island became a French overseas department meaning adopting the same legal and social system used in France. This change in status has consequences for the management of the mangrove ecosystems there. The National Forestry Authority has established itself in Mayotte and is drafting a management plan of the island's mangroves for the next 10 years.In this context, we conducted a campaign of interviews with stakeholders influencing the preservation and management of the island's mangroves in order to better understand their knowledge, representations and opinions. Overall, we carried out 25 semi-structured interviews with 12 from the central and local government, 5 from associations, 5 from the tourist sector and 3 from experts. Here, we focus on the knowledge of stakeholders and analyse it by two experts in the geomorphology and the ecology of the mangroves of Mayotte. The knowledge assessed from open-ended questions relates to the biodiversity and the specificity of Mayotte’s mangroves relative to mangroves in other territories; the nature and relative importance of impacts was evaluated from classifying and commenting a set of photographs; knowledge of the health status was assessed with a cognitive map exercise.Results show disparity in stakeholder’s knowledge depending on the topic. For instance, regarding the biodiversity, only some stakeholders think this ecosystem is particularly rich. Regarding the impacts on mangroves, all stakeholders agree that embankments, roads across mangroves and rubbish are very impacting but few are aware of the consequences of other impacts mentioned. This is the case with paths crossing the mangrove seaward: the majority of stakeholders didn’t know that this has been shown to contribute to the erosion of mangroves. These results are useful to know what kind of knowledge should be transmitted to stakeholders.