Page 25, Gosse et al: Coastal Cod in Newfoundland and Labrador CLOSING THE LOOP: COMMERCIAL FISH HARVESTERS ’ LOCAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE IN A STUDY OF COASTAL COD IN NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR, CANADA

• Main Authors: Karen Gosse, Joe Wroblewski, Barbara Neis
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Canada; Fuller; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.163.2041; http://www.fisheries.ubc.ca/publications/reports/11-1/06_Gosse_et_al.pdf

The intercouncil SSHRC/NSERC research project Coasts Under Stress (CUS) is investigating historical use and management of natural resources (e.g. fish stocks, forests and gas-oil reserves) on the east and west coasts of Canada, focusing on interactions between changes to the natural environment and social changes, as well as the ways these have affected human and environmental health. One goal of CUS is to document the local ecological knowledge (LEK) of resource users in order to investigate how LEK and science combined can help us understand changes in environmental health and develop effective strategies for future ecological recovery. LEK is a rich source of information on natural resources that is often not readily available in written form. Scientists often overlook the value of LEK for documenting long-term trends in local resource availability and the factors responsible for those trends. The ecological knowledge of fish harvesters consists of facts obtained through firsthand experience during years of observation while fishing. Harvesters ’ inductive-deductive reasoning, however, may lead to an incomplete understanding of how nature works. The value of the scientific approach to understanding nature lies in the rigors of hypothesis testing, which exposes those areas of a paradigm where knowledge is incomplete. Thus LEK, when integrated with results derived from formal scientific research, can often provide a fuller understanding of the natural environment and more complete information for management decisions. This paper diagrams the benefits of this two-way flow of information between scientists and local experts. Our research methodology combines scientific and harvesters’ knowledge of cod coloration to obtain a fuller understanding of the stock structure of coastal cod in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.