ABSTRACT. This research explores approaches towards supporting the co-production and mobilization of Clyde River, Nunavut, Inuit knowledge and meteorological information on local weather conditions. Through iterations led by a community organization, Ittaq Heritage and Research Centre, “Wavy” was collaboratively designed and developed as a custom, interactive geographic information system (GIS) to visualize human-relevant environmental variables, specifically winds and wave heights. With a community of users, Clyde River Inuit hunters, usability goals were identified and addressed in Wavy from ad-hoc meetings, semi-structured interviews, walkthroughs, follow-up gatherings, and heuristic evaluations. Key outcomes include: community-defined classifications of wave conditions and safety measures; a spatial data infrastructure for managing human-relevant environment variables for land-based and guardian monitoring programs; and the source code of Wavy with recommendations on advancing the user interface and experience for local to broader applications. Co-production of Wavy thus proved an effective strategy for advancing access to reliable local weather information.

ABSTRACT. Since time immemorial the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) has harvested dikameg (lake whitefish), which has developed into a strong cultural connection and understanding of these fascinating fish. Over the past two decades, Lake Huron has drastically changed resulting in the decline of dikameg. Dikameg play an important role in the ecosystems of Lake Huron, and for the SON dikameg is central to ceremony, trade, and subsistence. The Bima’azh project is using education, technology, Western science, and SON ecological knowledge (SONEK) to address community concerns around the decline of dikameg and in doing so, protect SON’s Indigenous Treaty Rights. The Bima’azh project also provides a clear example of research that achieves equitable inclusion of both Western and Indigenous systems of knowledge. Led by the SON fisheries offices, we challenge the status quo of fisheries research by ensuring SONEK and values are central to our project design, implementation, and interpretation. The application of a Two-Eyed Seeing approach within this project creates an example of a holistic and equitable approach to research that is important to share with the Great Lakes Community. Ultimately the Bima’azh Project provides an example of how Two-Eyed Seeing research can inform decision-making; ensuring dikameg thrive for the next seven generations.

ABSTRACT. Many Indigenous place names have been borrowed into non-Indigenous languages, such as English and French. These names often include environmental information as elements of the meaning, which may not be recognized or acknowledged in the borrowing language. This can become an issue when the naming language becomes less frequently used, endangered or even dormant; in many cases, the loss of the naming language may also represent the loss of the Traditional Environmental Knowledge contained within the place names.

Kanyen’kéha (known in English as the Mohawk language) is an endangered Indigenous language from which place names in North America have been borrowed. Ingram (2020) provided a linguistic overview for around 130 Kanyen’kéha names from both oral history and archival sources. Some of these have become elements of the Atlas of Kanyen’kehá:ka Space, a digital, community-controlled atlas. Launched in 2020 and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the National Indian Brotherhood Trust Fund, the goal of the atlas is to document, analyse, and preserve Kanyen’kéha linguistic, cultural, environmental and historical information through association with place names. The Atlas Research team is comprised of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators, academics and non-academics, and all members adhere to Teyohate Kaswentha (known in English as the Two-Row Wampum) as well as local Kanyen’kehá:ka protocols.

Documentation and preservation are achieved through community mapping workshops and youth summer camps in which participants are taught how to drop pins into the atlas and upload their own multimedia materials including text, photos, video, audio, and documents such as PDFs. At present over 190 points have been entered into the atlas together with 155 associated media files. The collaborative process of atlas creation, mapping, documentation and analysis is a union of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge and worldviews.

References

Ingram, Rebekah. 2020. Naming place in Kanyen'kéha: A study using the O'nonna Three-Sided Model. Ottawa: Carleton University. (Doctoral Dissertation.)

ABSTRACT. In the ecological literature, there is broad consensus that the diversity profile is a useful tool for diversity evaluation. Since the diversity profile is a positive, decreasing, and convex curve, it is possible to cast the problem of its estimation into a constrained functional context. In this work, a functional design-based estimation of diversity profiles is considered by taking into account the constrained nature of the profile. Indeed, a naive direct application of the functional data analysis methodology can be misleading, both theoretically and practically. To tackle this issue, the constrained estimation problem is redefined into an unconstrained one by defining the diversity profile in terms of a differential equation. An approximation of the bias and the variance of the estimator is derived using the delta method.

ABSTRACT. The presentation focusses on the evolution of a cod stock (Gadus morhua L.) in the Gulf of St-Lawrence, Canada that has been monitored by trawl surveys for about 20 years. During that period, the survey area has not been covered uniformly by the sampled sites and one objective of this presentation is to investigate whether modern spatio-temporal statistical models can be used to correct the deficiencies of the sampling design thereby permitting a better understanding of the stock evolution over the period. The base model for abundance is a generalized Poisson regression with a latent spatio-temporal Gaussian process. Methods for fitting such a model to large samples will be discussed. The impact of large abundances, that cannot be accounted for by a standard Poisson-lognormal model, will also be investigated. Generalizations of the standard Poisson regression that account for such large values are proposed. The results of a simulation study comparing the prediction of the latent process at unobserved points for various specifications of the latent process are presented.

ABSTRACT. Nursery habitats are critical areas for the growth and survival of juvenile fish and invertebrates. These habitats provide conditions favorable for growth and survival of juveniles through abundant food resources and refugia, and can significantly enhance secondary production of an exploited population and fishery. The quality of nursery habitats therefore has a direct impact on the success of fisheries management and conservation efforts. However, although the importance of nursery habitats to marine and estuarine species has been documented widely, the quantitative value of these habitats in population dynamics at spatial and temporal scales relevant to management has only recently been emphasized and documented for a few species. Hence, a need exists to quantify the relative value of nursery habitats to population dynamics of exploited species. One particularly useful approach to population dynamics modeling is the use of state-space models in fisheries stock assessment where data can be noisy and incomplete. These models can provide more defensible estimates of population size and growth rates while also incorporating environmental effects, which can help inform management decisions and ensure the sustainability of fisheries resources. Using multiple sources of juvenile and adult indices of abundance, in concert with spatiotemporal data on seagrass (habitat) extent, we developed a 3-stage state-space model of the effects of seagrass habitat distribution on Chesapeake Bay blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) population dynamics. We found that seagrass availability positively influenced the carrying capacity of blue crab populations, and as a result the long-term maximum sustainable yields varied considerably with seagrass aerial extent. Taken together, our results indicate that management action should consider seagrass availability within blue crab population dynamics models to set more realistic harvest and seagrass conservation targets.