Evaluating cumulative impacts to ecosystem wellbeing to inform effective conservation action

The accumulation of stressors to diverse ecosystems has resulted in losses to ecological resilience and health, erasure of cultural knowledge of place, and alterations in understanding effective baselines of wellbeing for both Peoples and place. This lack of place-based understanding complicates our ability to make effective conservation decisions, as it challenges our ability to assess impact and construct recovery targets. The Salish Sea of British Columbia, Canada is one such place of ecological and cultural importance that has been highly impacted by accumulating stressors, and that requires more nuanced understanding of cumulative impact rooted in a long-term, place-based lens. This dissertation weaves together approaches from multiple fields—including Indigenous storytelling, cumulative impact assessments, historical ecology, and decision analysis—to evaluate how we effectively steward the diverse ecosystems of the Salish Sea under interactive, cumulative impacts in ways that honor the long-term stories of place. In Chapter 2, we worked with Indigenous Elders and knowledge holders in the Salish Sea to honor stories of place currently missing from regional conservation efforts, co-creating narratives of place across past, present, and future stories. We used these stories of place to help frame and assess cumulative impacts to the wellbeing of two significant ecosystems in the region—cedar forests (Chapter 3) and oak-camas meadows (Chapter 4). Chapter 3 focused on investigating cumulative stressors to values-based indicators of impact in cedar forests, while Chapter 4 presented a method to account for shifted baselines and assess gaps to ecosystem recovery of oak-camas meadows rooted in long-term understanding of place. In Chapter 5, we evaluated cost-effective strategies for mitigating one dominant stressor in the region—hyperabundant browsers—while augmenting ecological, cultural, and human health. Together, insights from these chapters work to restore stories and knowledge of place missing from current conservation and restoration efforts to inform more effective decisions in the region. Additionally, the various chapters provide novel methodologies and applications that can help improve decision-making across the globe, in areas where place-based understanding has been eroded by long-term cumulative impacts to place.