Monitoring fishes with Indigenous ecological knowledge and Western scientific data

We completed this collaborative study with the Cree Nation of Mistissini (CNM) to help develop CNM’s environmental monitoring and management tools, and further develop the communal understanding about how Indigenous ecological knowledge (IEK) and Western scientific data (WSD) can be woven to these ends.

IEK and WSD are both rich sources of information.

Previous biodiversity research has shown that sometimes IEK and WSD provide the same information, and sometimes different.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

Understanding when IEK and WSD provide the same or different results, and why they may do so, could provide information to help Indigenous communities make decisions about which knowledge type is best suited to environmental monitoring and management.

We evaluated the general hypothesis that congruence in outcomes of IEK and WSD for population monitoring parameters is determined by temporal and spatial scale of the knowledge type.

Parameters included population grouping (structure), degree to which fish return to spawning grounds (philopatry), variation in shape and size (morphological variation), and for one species — conservation status.

We tested this hypothesis in three subsistence and recreational fisheries (walleye, lake trout, northern pike) in Mistassini Lake, Quebec, Canada.

Concordance of outcomes was varied.

IEK provided richer information on the biology, distribution, and morphological variation observable with the eyes.

However, IEK cannot ‘see’ into the genome, and WSD identified population structure and history more precisely than IEK.

Both knowledge types could ‘see’ change in populations, and the nature of what was seen both converged and was complementary.

This work has helped us determine what the strengths of each knowledge type are, where these results appear to be generalizable to other ecosystems and species, and where further work is needed.

Read the paper — Freshwater fisheries monitoring in northern ecosystems using Indigenous ecological knowledge, genomics, and life history: Insights for community decision-making by Ella Bowles , Hyung-Bae Jeon, Kia Marin, Pamela MacLeod, and Dylan J. Fraser.