Kawika Winter

Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales

Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives — encompassing values, knowledges, and needs — and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.Biocultural approaches combining local values, knowledge, and needs with global ecological factors provide a fruitful indicator framework for assessing local and global well-being and sustainability, and help bridge the divide between them.

A linked land-sea modeling framework to inform ridge-to-reef management in high oceanic islands

Declining natural resources have led to a cultural renaissance across the Pacific that seeks to revive customary ridge-to-reef management approaches to protect freshwater and restore abundant coral reef fisheries. Effective ridge-to-reef management requires improved understanding of land-sea linkages and decision-support tools to simultaneously evaluate the effects of terrestrial and marine drivers on coral reefs, mediated by anthropogenic activities. Although a few applications have linked the effects of land cover to coral reefs, these are too coarse in resolution to inform watershed-scale management for Pacific Islands. To address this gap, we developed a novel linked land-sea modeling framework based on local data, which coupled groundwater and coral reef models at fine spatial resolution, to determine the effects of terrestrial drivers (groundwater and nutrients), mediated by human activities (land cover/use), and marine drivers (waves, geography, and habitat) on coral reefs. We applied this framework in two ‘ridge-to-reef’ systems (Hā‘ena and Ka‘ūpūlehu) subject to different natural disturbance regimes, located in the Hawaiian Archipelago. Our results indicated that coral reefs in Ka‘ūpūlehu are coral-dominated with many grazers and scrapers due to low rainfall and wave power. While coral reefs in Hā‘ena are dominated by crustose coralline algae with many grazers and less scrapers due to high rainfall and wave power. In general, Ka‘ūpūlehu is more vulnerable to land-based nutrients and coral bleaching than Hā‘ena due to high coral cover and limited dilution and mixing from low rainfall and wave power. However, the shallow and wave sheltered back-reef areas of Hā‘ena, which support high coral cover and act as nursery habitat for fishes, are also vulnerable to land-based nutrients and coral bleaching. Anthropogenic sources of nutrients located upstream from these vulnerable areas are relevant locations for nutrient mitigation, such as cesspool upgrades. In this study, we located coral reefs vulnerable to land-based nutrients and linked them to priority areas to manage sources of human-derived nutrients, thereby demonstrating how this framework can inform place-based ridge-to-reef management.

The Quantum Co-Evolution Unit: An Example of ‘Awa (Kava—Piper methysticum G. Foster) in Hawaiian Culture

The Quantum Co-Evolution Unit: An Example of ‘Awa (Kava—Piper methysticum G. Foster) in Hawaiian Culture. The process of co-evolution occurs in many kinds of relationships and on various scales. One example of a co-evolutionary relationship is that of a plant and a culture with which it interacts. Such relationships are dynamic and ever changing. Researchers have discussed this concept and its implications for decades, yet no quantifiable unit or standardized scale has been accepted with which to measure this change. The theoretical “quantum co-evolution unit” (QCU) is proposed as the smallest measurable scale of interactions between plants and people. A collection of QCUs for a linked plant and human population would be its “ethnobotanical population.” This could be measured at various points in time to quantify the changing relationships between plants and people. These models set up a structure to discuss methodologies for quantifying co-evolutionary relationships such as are seen in the evolution of ethnobotanical populations. The co-evolving relationship between ‘awa (kava—Piper methysticum) and Hawaiian culture is used as an example to illustrate this idea.