STRONG Manoomin Collective Projects
Focused CoPe: Strengthening Resilience of Manoomin, the Sentinel Species of the Great Lakes, with Data-Science Supported Seventh Generation Stewardship
NSF Coastlines and Peoples Award “Focused CoPe: Strengthening Resilience of Manoomin, the Sentinel Species of the Great Lakes, with Data-Science Supported Seventh Generation Stewardship”, #2209226 (CoPe), 8/1/2022 – 7/31/2027, $5 million, PI: Josiah Hester (Georgia Tech, Northwestern University–adjunct)
Vision
To develop cyber, scientific, and community foundations to ensure 7th generation sustainability of the Western Great Lakes. We bring together tribes, conservationists, and researchers around manoomin (wild rice) as a pillar of Ojibwe culture and livelihood, and as a keystone sentinel species for understanding and conserving Great Lakes coastal wetlands.
Goals
Enable creation of Indigenous-led, data-driven resilience strategies for the manoomin ecosystem–mindful of the 7th Generation perspective–incorporating a suite of key science advances that are broadly translatable to other vulnerable coastal societies and ecosystems.
Increase participation of Great Lakes Indigenous people in science through culturally empowering and sovereignty-affirming collaborative research in support of manoomin wetlands
Activities
Activity is organized into four synergistic themes that engage researchers across disciplines including: political science, natural science, computing and data science, communication and journalism, education, and engineering.
Sensing and Data Science
Builds new sensing capability and data science tools to support all hub activities. By extracting new sources of data in the Western Great Lakes region, we can generate new understanding about connections between physical processes, ecosystem factors, and human activity.
This theme captures data from all four orders, physical, plants and wildlife, and human, to aid other themes.
Physical and Environmental Processes
Integrates new sensing capabilities with Tribal knowledge to uncover fundamental processes that organize coastal wetland ecosystems, including interrelationships between climate, land use, habitat conditions, and feedback from plant growth at multiple spatial and temporal scales. This theme addresses critical uncertainties about how perturbations to these processes – e.g., climate change, land development – are causing widespread declines.
Governance, Social, and Human Dimensions
Investigates the governance systems that guide decision-making and manage the social and human dimensions of manoomin resilience. Currently, hundreds of Tribal, governmental, private, and community agencies and organizations govern the manoomin range using a complicated, sometimes overlapping and often competing set of public and private treaties, laws, regulations, policies, and norms, all of which operate at different governance levels. This theme explores the ways such fragmented governance presents challenges for advancing Manoomin resilience, and includes generating institutional and policy analyses that can inform Tribal-led and data-driven, cooperative governance arrangements.
Community Engagement, Communication, and Education
Strengthens relationships between university researchers, Tribal entities, and conservation organizations. The theme brings together longstanding leaders in Indigenous education and community engagement.