There is a nice piece by Virginia Morrell on Science's webpages (see external link below) covering recent work by Steve Ferguson and colleagues.

They used interviews with local Inuit hunters to try and reconstruct the local ecology of killer whales in the Canadian Arctic.

They are working in a region where killer whales occur at relatively low density which makes it challenging to build up sample sizes of direct observation data. So they have had to come up with some interesting and novel approaches which include the interviews they have conducted with the local Inuit hunters. By tapping into that local knowledge they have gathered data 'collected' over decades, and have been able to form a picture of the ecology of killer whales in this area.

To some extent we all undergo this process when we start working at a new field site, we talk to local people and especially fishermen and people working around the water, to help us develop our fieldwork strategies. But it's rare to see it written up like this as a paper and its a refreshing approach that has produced valuable insights.

At the European Cetacean Society conference in Galway in March we are running a North Atlantic killer whales workshop and have asked Steve to give a talk on the work by his lab group, reflecting the importance of all the studies they have conducted. Some of their recent results include an incredible satellite track from a whale tagged in the Canadian Arctic which moved down to waters near the Azores. It highlights how when working with such highly mobile predators, researchers need to collaborate and pool data to cover the entire geographic range, and how we need to use innovative approaches such as the Inuit interviews used by Ferguson et al., when working in areas with low killer whale occurrence, but where they could still have a significant role in the ecosystem.

The results of the surveys with Inuit hunters are published in the journal Aquatic Biosystems: 

http://www.aquaticbiosystems.org/content/8/1/3/abstract