Indigenous-led land planning provides unprecedented opportunities to include indigenous knowledge (IK) to understand ecological and cultural values across landscapes. The deep, long temporal breadth of knowledge as well as the enduring stewardship commitment of indigenous people to their homelands provides a strong foundation for conservation planning of large landscapes. I provide examples of using IK to build species habitat models, IK-based ecosystem maps, and cultural landscape models. Through the incorporation of these IK-based spatial models within a Systematic Conservation Planning framework, we develop decision-support tools that support indigenous land visioning and planning. While the communities we work with are increasingly concerned about the potential impacts of a changing climate on their traditional values and territories, the complex suite of climate change metrics available are overwhelming, and we have found it challenging to explain or use many of these with our indigenous partners. We have linked predicted changes in major ecosystem distributions to the IK species habitat models to provide visual representations of the potential changes to key values. This work, carefully presented, resonates with communities, particularly when the selected species are of high cultural value. These predicted shifts in habitat distributions can also be incorporated into systematic conservation planning to allow planning for both current and potential future habitat distributions. Our work bridging Indigenous knowledge and values with western science and tools has provided rigorous spatial data platforms (maps) that support our indigenous partners to develop their own stewardship visions of large, connected landscapes, which inherently support cultural and ecological resilience now and into an uncertain future.
Dr. Kimberly Heinemeyer is the Project Director and Lead Scientist at Round River Canada and Director of Conservation Science at Round River Conservation Studies. Round River Canada, a project of MakeWay’s shared platform, is a natural extension of the parent organization and reflects the growing involvement and commitment to our conservation partners in Canada. Kim has worked on large landscape conservation planning initiatives in Canada since 1998, including in partnership with the Taku River Tlingit, Carcross/Tagish, and Kwanlin Dun First Nations in northwestern BC and southern Yukon; the Inuvialuit and the Wildlife Management Advisory Council (YNS) for the Yukon North Slope; and with the Muskwa Kechika Advisory Board for NE BC. Through years of working with indigenous knowledge holders, Kim has acquired a deep respect and commitment to the value of Indigenous Knowledge (IK), and has spent much of her career learning from Knowledge Holders and developing respectful ways to weave IK with western science to inform and support indigenous land visioning and indigenous-led land relationship planning.
