Grant: Alliance Grants

Coastal areas face a variety of complex challenges, with uncertain and mostly negative consequencesfor Indigenous and non-Indigenous coastal communities. This is especially true for seagrass (Zostera marina, eelgrass) meadows, which provide essential services to communities, have diverse values associated and are exposed to multiple stressors. Because the mechanisms driving eelgrass meadows predictability are still poorly understood, using monitoring data to produce reliable forecasts based on these predictions remains a challenge. To tackle these challenges, conventional science must consider coastal areas as coupled social-ecological systems (SES) where settler, Indigenous values, norms and local ways of knowing interact. The inclusion of different perspectives in ecosystem monitoring is essential to co-design monitoring strategies that can effectively track physical, biogeochemical, and ecological changes through space and time. In addition, weaving diverse ways of knowing into ecosystem monitoring and social dynamics can greatly improve predictions and the sustainable management of marine and coastal SES under climate change. It is also powerful in bridging the gap between the different end-users, rightsholders and stakeholders that make up coastal SES. Our approach aims at weaving multiple ways of knowing to develop holistic monitoring to feed coupled social-ecological forecasting models on eelgrass meadows in New Brunswick and support inclusive sustainable management led by Indigenous and non-Indigenous coastal communities. This seed grant funding will be used to reach the first step of this overall objective: co-designing with partners meaningful and inclusive goals and protocols for later developments and funding applications.