Skip to main content
2023 ESA Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Symposium
Symposium

SYMP 6 - Islands, Restoration, and Indigenous Knowledge

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM PDT
Location: 257

The United Nations declared 2021-2030 as ‘The Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’, underscoring the importance of restoration as a global priority to tackle the dual biodiversity decline and climate crises. Our proposed session focuses on islands - there are about 900,000 islands in the world, home to about 11% of the global population. Islands are both biodiversity and extinction hotspots; they have 9 times more endemism than mainlands and harbor 40% of the world’s endangered species. Therefore, management and restoration is critically important on islands, because it will have outsized benefits in addressing the biodiversity crisis and because islands lead the way in developing new methods and approaches for restoration.
Much of the island restoration scientific literature is focused on westernized, colonial conceptions of management, leaving the rich history and knowledge of island communities who have been working to preserve and restore islands largely ignored. In other cases, traditional practices may be culturally important but ecologically unsustainable, and novel integrated approaches may offer a way forward to preserve island habitats. In either case, integration of western and traditional ways of knowing is necessary to preserve biodiversity, ecosystem services and the continued wellbeing of local communities. By highlighting innovative research in island systems, this session will aim to bridge westernized and traditional knowledge and to highlight novel approaches for restoration.

Presentations:

  • 10:00 AM – 10:20 AM PDT
    Reconciling traditional but non-sustainable livestock husbandry practices with modern conservation approaches in an Mediterranean island setting.

    Presenting Author: Johannes Foufopoulos, n/a – University of Michigan

    Co-author: Chelsea Lisiecki – University of Michigan

  • 10:20 AM – 10:40 AM PDT
    Applying biodiversity and human value measures to meet conservation goals in Micronesian Island forests

    Presenting Author: Ann Marie Gawel, Environmental Biology – SUNY ESF

  • 10:40 AM – 11:00 AM PDT
    Upena of Pilina: Revitalizing Connections Between Kānaka ʻŌiwi Food Systems and Arthropods.

    Presenting Author: Leke Hutchins – University of California-Berkley

  • 11:00 AM – 11:20 AM PDT
    Assessing islander students' understanding of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and plant-animal interactions through locally relevant classroom modules.

    Presenting Author: Harmony Yomai – Virginia Tech University

    Co-author: Haldre Rogers – Virginia Tech

  • 11:20 AM – 11:30 AM PDT
    Discussion