A three‐pronged approach that leans on Indigenous knowledge for northern fish monitoring and conservation

Abstract

Abstract Investigating whether changes within fish populations may result from harvesting requires a comprehensive approach, especially in more data‐sparse northern regions. Our study took a three‐pronged approach to investigate walleye population change by combining Indigenous knowledge (IK), phenotypic traits, and genomics. We thank Larson et al. (2020) for their critiques of our study; certainly, there are aspects of their critique that are warranted and merit further investigation. However, we argue that their critique is over‐stated and misleading, primarily given that (a) one of three prongs of our research, IK, was dismissed in their assessment of our study's conclusions; (b) our Bayesian size‐at‐age modeling should help to mitigate sample size issues; (c) their re‐analysis of our size‐at‐age data does not actually refute our results; (d) genomic changes that we observed are nascent; (e) the data file that Larson et al. (2020) used for their genomic re‐analysis was not correct; and (f) criteria that Larson et al. (2020) use for their genomic re‐analysis were not properly justified.

Keywords

• bioinformatic filtering
• body size
• genomics
• harvesting
• Indigenous knowledge
• size at age