1. Indigenous people often manage natural environments and resources based on landscape features. Rights and management responsibilities that follow pathways of water from their source in alpine areas down and ultimately into and out to sea are common. Contemporary frameworks that seek to support management of the environment, ecosystems and resources from marine areas to alpine zones are not so connected. The EastOtago Taiāpure and Waikouaiti Mātaitai are Customary Protection Areas (CPAs) that connect from fresh water into the marine environment. These CPAs fall within the cultural landscape of Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki, the hapū (sub-tribe) of Ngāi Tahu, the iwi (tribe) who holds mana whenua (authority) over East Otago.CPAs may provide a way for iwi and hapū to manage a catchment as a whole, and to allow for traditional approaches to management within a contemporary legislative framework.3. Despite local successes in restoring habitat, changing legislation, gaining knowledge and building community support for change, fundamental issues remain.Members of the East Otago Taiāpure Committee reflect on the last 15 years of management and identify constraints and enablers of community-led management across inherently connected ecosystems using a kaupapa Māori approach. A compartmentalized view of connected ecosystems, complex legislation and government-focused processes emerge as issues that make even seemingly simple issues complicated for community managers.

No abstract

Loss of access to cultural keystone species is a familiar story across the Pacific. Serial depletion of pāua (abalone, Haliotis iris), a cultural keystone for Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, threatens Indigenous practices and values. Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka ki Puketeraki, a hapū (subtribe) of Ngāi Tahu, have struggled for over 30 years to address loss of local pāua populations. Regulations introduced by the East Otago Taiāpure, a customary fishery management area established in 1999, recognise Indigenous rights to access and manage marine resources. Despite concerted efforts to rebuild pāua populations while allowing fishing, pāua have continued to decline and the fishery was closed in 2019. A wealth of mātauranga (Māori knowledge) surrounds enhancement practices for pāua. Here, mātauranga relating to translocation was collated through interviews and applied, in conjunction with additional knowledge bases, to translocate pāua from reefs threatened by sand inundation to more accessible but historically overexploited bays. In total, 420 pāua, translocated across 21 sites, were monitored for a 2-week period, after which aggregations returned to pretranslocation densities. Total mortality reached 8.8% over this time, attributed primarily to predation by the sea star Astrostole scabra. Results suggest that translocation may not be suitable for creating artificial aggregations using the methods applied; however, it could address other management concerns, hence suggestions are made for methodological improvements. The interaction between pāua and A. scabra demonstrates the need for continued transformation in management to allow for the application of a multispecies integrated approach in the restoration of pāua.

No abstract

Relationships with place provide critical context for characterizing biocultural diversity. Yet, genetic and genomic studies are rarely informed by Indigenous or local knowledge, processes, and practices, including the movement of culturally significant species. Here, we show how place-based knowledge can better reveal the biocultural complexities of genetic or genomic data derived from culturally significant species.As a case study, we focus on culturally significant southern freshwater kōura (crayfish) in Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu (New Zealand, herein Aotearoa NZ). Our results, based on genotyping-by-sequencing markers, reveal strong population genetic structure along with signatures of population admixture in 19 genetically depauperate populations across the east coast of Te Waipounamu. Environment association and differentiation analyses for local adaptation also indicate a role for hydroclimatic variables-including temperature, precipitation, and water flow regimes-in shaping local adaptation in kōura. Through trusted partnerships between community and researchers, weaving genomic markers with place-based knowledge has both provided