Anne Salomon is a Professor of Applied Marine Ecology and Social-Ecological System Science at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management.
Her goal is to discover what makes the relationships between people and other components of coastal ocean ecosystems resilient to disturbances.
She and her students combine manipulative field experiments, quantitative models, and archeological reconstructions with Indigenous knowledge to reveal nature’s mysteries and inform ecologically resilient and socially just ocean policies.
Presentation:
Supporting the Resilience of Canada’s Pacific Kelp Forests
Anne Salomon
Simon Fraser University, Canada
The future of Canada’s Pacific kelp forests lies at the nexus of extreme and incremental climate disturbances, predator recovery, a burgeoning blue economy, and a dynamic policy landscape, both locally and globally. For over a decade, we have been working in collaboration with Indigenous and state governments, natural and social scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and fishermen to reveal the social-ecological relationships that underpin the resilience of these high latitude underwater forests. By bringing western and Indigenous knowledge systems into conversation, we have found that kelps are surprisingly resilient to moderate magnitudes of harvest, yet their recovery rates are highly sensitive to even slight increases in sea surface temperature. The hidden impacts of climate change however are more insidious. Kelp forest susceptibility to epiphytic bryozoan outbreaks increases with warmer ocean temperatures and higher kelp density yet decreases with greater wave exposure. Moreover, all these dynamics are playing out amid changing predator abundances, societal norms, and policies supporting the rights and responsibilities of coastal Indigenous Nations. Fortunately, proactive and equitable climate solutions exist, including selecting cooler, more wave-exposed harvest sites, reducing and shifting the timing of harvest in warmer years, and experimenting with mariculture activities that attend to the multidimensional objectives of local communities. Many of these strategies reflect ancestral Indigenous practices, values, and laws which govern human-environment relationships. As countries worldwide develop blue economy policies and climate solutions, these results emphasize that kelp forest resilience can be supported by taking a social-ecological systems approach, considering nested scales of governance, co-producing knowledge, and considering local contexts and objectives amid global influences.