Using Co-Production of Knowledge to Reconstruct Coastal Food Webs

Coastal ecosystems provide vital goods and services including the maintenance of fisheries but are among the most degraded ecosystems worldwide. To restore and maintain coastal ecosystems for future generations, resource managers need a detailed understanding of an ecosystem’s healthy baseline condition. However, baseline conditions used in management strategies are almost always temporally stunted (<50 years) and fail to capture ecosystem dynamics of these environments before human impact. The proposed research will combine advanced stable isotope analysis techniques and co-production of knowledge (e.g., traditional scientific and local ecological knowledge systems) with the construction of a deep time (~1,500 years ago) and a present-day food web model. These models will be the foundation of an ecological network analysis that will compare ecosystem metrics from deep time to present-day. This effort will be the first ecosystem model ever developed for the IRL. The team hypothesized that the deeper time ecosystem metrics will exhibit more resilient characteristics than the present-day system. While it is unlikely that an ecosystem can return to its ‘true historic condition’, understanding the historic ecology of a system will help us build a stronger future for our coastal ecosystems and communities by better informing recovery targets and management strategies.