Indigenous knowledge of key ecological processes confers resilience to a small-scale kelp fishery

1. Feedbacks between social and ecological processes can lead to sustainable stewardship practices that support ecological resilience among harvested populations. This is evident along the world’s coast lines, where Indigenous knowledge systems have facilitated millennia of human nature coexistence. However, social-ecological conditions globally are quickly shifting, posing challenges for coastal Indigenous communities where customary harvest of ocean resources, such as kelps, need to adapt to growing markets, novel climates and changing governance regimes. Consequently, a pressing need exists to determine how specific ecological and social variables drive key dynamics within coupled human-ocean systems.
2. Motivated by the information needs of an Indigenous community on Canada’s Pacific Coast, we co-designed a traditional harvest experiment, field surveys, and semi-directed interviews with Indigenous resource users and managers to measure the ecological resilience of the feather boa ke...