Developing guidelines for and assessing relationships among biocultural indicators to improve long-term resilience of Pacific social and ecological communities

Working group leaders: Tamara Ticktin (UHM Botany), Stacy Jupiter (Wildlife Conservation Society Melanesia), Manuel Mejia (The Nature Conservancy- Hawaii), Eleanor Sterling and Chris Filardi (American Museum of Natural History) and Rachel Dacks (UHM Biology)

This collaborative project is funded through the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Science for Nature and People Initiative (SNaP) and focuses on developing and assessing biocultural indicators of resilience in Pacific Island communities. Pacific Island communities face unprecedented challenges in conserving natural resources and maintaining human well-being. Gaining a better understanding of the factors driving community resilience and the supportive management practices and policies is urgent. Biocultural feedbacks are widely believed to play a critical role in fostering the adaptive capacity of resilient human and ecological communities, but they are poorly understood. Understanding biocultural linkages and feedbacks requires overcoming two challenges: 1) development of consistent methodologies to identify and measure them; and 2) development of appropriate models to explore how their benefits are affected by social and environmental pressures. Through synthesis of the literature and comparative data analyses from on-going projects across a wide range of Pacific Island communities, we will identify (i) What makes a good set of biocultural indicators and how can they be measured?; (ii) How can we scale local to global metrics that have relevance across diverse Pacific Island sites?; and (iii) What is the relationship between pressures, ‘biocultural state’, benefits and management responses in Pacific Island communities? Outputs will include journal articles, policy briefs, guidelines and peer learning tools for communities, and strategic findings summaries that will assist resource managers at various levels to plan for desired biocultural states in a rapidly changing world.