Ying Zheng, Larissa A. Naylor, Susan Waldron, David M. Oliver, Tao Peng

The report summaries the first stage output from the Knowledge Exchange (KE) research carried out in one of China’s rural areas in the karst landscape, aiming to understand the local knowledge sharing dynamic and learning preference of stakeholders. A social science survey was carried out in November 2016 in 7 villages of Puding County to 15 county leaders, 8 town leaders and 24 village leaders along with 312 farmers. This survey helped us to gain an appreciation of existing environmental understanding of different public groups, how they currently learn and how they would like to learn about new scientific findings that influence farming and land management practice in Puding County. This report documents a high-level summary (the data is analysed at the county level) about the land use practices of local science users, the KE approach preferred by different public groups and about how the science-policy-practice interface works in Puding county. With this report, and the discussions that stem from it with Chinese practitioners and leaders, we anticipate that more effective communication can be fostered between scientists and the public science users, and between different user groups to increase the use of scientific advances in county to farm scale policy and practice.