Resumen
Kumeyaay people were historically hunter-gatherers with a strong relationship with their natural resources. Due to various processes, such as missionary colonization, agrarian reform, and the definition of the border between the USA and Mexico in 1838, the Indigenous populations faced reduced mobility within their territory and modified their lifestyles, highly related to landscape and plants. One of their strong traditional practices associated with plant resources, basket-making, has likewise changed. Today, this activity is one of the most important sources of income for many of the families in the community. Nevertheless, this is being now threatened by the loss of vegetation cover, from which they obtain primary basket-making material and is now far from being environmentally and economically sustainable. An interdisciplinary group is addressing this problem from a multidisciplinary perspective and through a participatory methodological approach based on community mapping to enable the integration of local and scientific knowledge and to create vegetation management and conservation actions. Community-based Indigenous mapping has proven to be a powerful tool for the integration of traditional knowledge and its various dimensions, and knowledge integration between traditional and scientific knowledge has been successful. The project allowed for plant population analysis and adequate decision-making regarding natural resources management and conservation. The methods developed in this research represent significant progress in the development of internal capacities and empowerment of the community.