Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences
nlincoln [at] hawaii [dot] edu
Bio: Noa Lincoln is kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) and kama’aina (native born) to Kealakekua on Hawai’i Island. His childhood consists of unique training by Hawaiian elders in la’au lapa’au (ethnobotany) and traditional management methods for agriculture and ocean resources. Dr. Lincoln completed his formal trainings at Yale University (ʻ03) in Environmental Engineering and Stanford University (ʻ13) in Biogeochemistry and Social Ecology. He has worked and studied across the Pacific Rim in California, Costa Rica, Brazil, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Marquesas, among other places. Much of his applied training through mentorship has focused on the installation of cultural values into management systems, often through the development of multiple bottom line assessment tools.
Projects: Dr. Lincoln has and continues to research a broad spectrum of areas, including forest ecology and management, restoration ecology, archaeology, personal values and sense of place, and terrestrial biogeochemistry within both natural and human dominated systems (i.e. agriculture). His primary focus, however, is on indigenous cropping systems and their interaction with human societies in both the past and the present. Using development pathways on islands as model systems for understanding the complex interaction between humans and their environment, Noa builds upon the important work of the human biocomplexity project (see Kirch 2010 for a good summary). By working with modern day restoration efforts Noa also seeks to define the role that these systems have today, including their impacts on culture, education, environment, and food.