School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences

Working at the intersection of environmental justice, food sovereignty, and community-based research, Nicole Doran is centering Indigenous perspectives in her work. Nicole’s research for her masters degree, as a member of Mark Scheuerell’s Applied Ecology Lab at SAFS, has involved a deep dive into available literature to examine the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous food systems.

With this year marking the 50th anniversary of the Boldt Decision, which upheld the rights of members of several Western Washington Indigenous tribes to fish in accordance with terms of treaties signed in the 1850s, discussions around this topic remain deeply relevant.

Nicole’s literature review, comprising her first thesis chapter, delved into historical documents, accounts, academic papers, traditional ecological knowledge, and reports. “I’m presenting a framework for understanding the layers of environmental injustice that permeates cultural food systems such as those maintained by Indigenous communities,” she said.

In order to take a deeper look into how Indigenous thoughts about topics such as food sovereignty and access differ from western science, Nicole highlights an example: “When thinking about contaminants and banning fishing, state or federal regulators may decide that any containment above a certain level means fishing should be banned. Indigenous ways of thinking have a different focus on this issue, where either no level of containment is acceptable, or that a particular fish is so important spiritually and traditionally in the community, that it should still be harvested,” she shared.

Digging into the concepts of food sovereignty and food security, and the big impact of environmental justice on Indigenous food systems, Nicole found that there is a key distinction to be made. “A lot of Indigenous communities lack food security, but for ones who have this, it isn’t enough. Food sovereignty is highly important too,” Nicole said. “Is the food they have access to healthy, traditional, and prepared in a self-governed way? Food sovereignty elements are extremely important, but in the eyes of the government for example, who provide food and other commodities – spam, white flour, sugar, oil – this food security is enough.” The topic of limitations on access to traditional and cultural food also brings to the fore issues around the nutritional value and healthiness of commodities provided, which have led to increases in diabetes and heart disease in these communities. In the food literature that Nicole looked into as part of her second chapter on this topic, she found that food security and food sovereignty weren’t considered together, but they should be.

Nicole Doran

Bringing all of this work together in her third chapter, Nicole explored how to build resilience from an ecology perspective. Indigenous communities recognize that our world is always in flux – climate, food, environment, resources – and it’s an important aspect to consider when thinking about food systems. “The principle of being in a relationship with environments in traditional ways, not separated from nature, but rather tightly interwoven through reciprocal relationships, is incredibly important,” Nicole shared, but this has been significantly affected by settler colonialism.

One of the key takeaways Nicole wants to highlight from her research has been the ways in which people should connect with Indigenous ways of thinking and scholarship: “There are a lot of well-meaning people wanting to connect with Indigenous scholars, but the first step is to engage with the land you work on and look more deeply into how science itself has been impacted by settler colonialism”. Another vital learning that Nicole wants to share is the importance of ethical collaboration. “Bringing back the research to the community, sharing the outcomes, speaking openly, and respecting the relationship of trust that has been developed, is so important, and a lesson worth learning for a lot of people working in this space,” she noted.

From Alaska to California, researchers are looking into the impact of climate change on the distribution of fish that live near the seafloor. Focusing on species such as halibut, pollock, sablefish and rockfishes, which have commercial and environmental importance for the Pacific Coast of the US, these fish are impacted in different ways by shifting ocean temperature and oxygen, resulting in a myriad of knock-on effects.

We spoke with Julia Indivero, a PhD student at SAFS, about what some of these effects could be. Rising temperatures and decreasing oxygen may affect where fish can live, which in turn may change how close they are to boats and ports involved in the fishing industry. “Fishers are used to fish being in a certain area, and if fish move farther away, this may become difficult for fishery operations. Different species responses to ocean conditions may also change the overlap in habitat between species and impact possible bycatch issues,” Julia shared.

Julia’s research is combining data to look at the Pacific Coast in its entirety, versus being separated out by region as is usually done in work on this topic. By combining predictions for multiple regions, researchers can build models which include more sensitivities and reflect broader-scale change in fish distribution.

Conducting her work in Tim Essington’s Marine Conservation and Ecology Group, Julia’s quantitative research involves developing models to predict where fish may be located under future climate change scenarios. By combining data on ocean conditions and on fish abundance from thousands of locations each year from the 1990s through 2023, these models estimate how fish abundances are impacted by temperature and oxygen. Then, these relationships are used to predict fish abundances at these locations if temperature and oxygen change, following what global forecasts of human-caused carbon emissions expect.

Countries and fishery management bodies around the globe are interested in understanding how fish distributions might shift in future climates.

“The possible implications for transboundary governance is especially interesting. Quotas, catch limits, treaties, and protected areas, are all based on geographic locations, but fish ignore these boundaries when big climate change shifts happen,” Julia said.  

This makes the ability to predict future fish distributions even more important, so that individuals, regions, and countries, can better anticipate these changes and put in place the required modifications to management structures and boundaries now.

There is an inherent level of uncertainty when making forecasts based on climate change shifts in ocean temperature and oxygen. The models that Julia works on recognize these uncertainties: “There’s uncertainty in the level of carbon emissions that will happen, there’s uncertainty in the exact temperature and oxygen change in the ocean, there’s uncertainty in how fish will respond to a changing environment. But predictions can provide us with plausible scenarios and a range of possible future situations.” One area that needs some work, Julia mentions, is understanding how relationships between fish and ocean conditions that are based on data from the past, may hold up or break down in a warmer world: “We’re developing methods to try to better predict how fish might respond to temperature and oxygen levels that are completely beyond what they’ve experienced before.”

What would pre-emptive action to deal with future changes in fishery distribution look like for those on the ground?

“Fishers could look at these predictions and start investing in different types of vessels and gear needed to catch new fish in their fishing areas,” Julia said. “Being able to share scientific information that informs diversification efforts would be a great benefit,” she added.  

On a large scale, ports and cities can start investing in infrastructure that has the ability to process different fish products based on future predictions. Managers can begin developing flexible policies that allow individual vessels and fishers to switch permits between species. It also reaches the highest level of those involved in fisheries management. “At an international level, future predictions of fish distribution mean they can start thinking about how to deal with, and adapt, to species moving in and out of national boundaries,” Julia shared.

Now in her fourth year at SAFS and just getting started on this research, Julia will be focusing on this topic for the remainder of her PhD.

Fighting for the little guy. That’s one of the things Jess Diallo, PhD candidate at SAFS, likes about her work. Her research encapsulates this idea as she explores the impact of invasive fish on native fish food webs, based in a tributary to the lower Colorado River.

Part of Julian Olden’s Freshwater Ecology and Conservation Lab, Jess’ fieldwork in 2021 involved collecting samples for stable isotope analysis, including fish eye lenses, to provide a deeper look into how fish move throughout the food web.

“The two main characters in this story are roundtail chub, a native fish, and green sunfish, an invasive species,” Jess shared. “It’s important to study the impact of invasive species on native populations as the whole ecosystem can be impacted by the predation and competition threat that they pose,” she added.

Jess Diallo

The invasive fish living in her study site, the Burro Creek basin of the Bill Williams River, a tributary of the lower Colorado River, consist of species introduced throughout the last century, which are now the focus of sport fishing, including bullhead and green sunfish. Native species in this system include roundtail chub, desert sucker and Sonora sucker.

“Using fish eye lenses to conduct stable isotope analysis is a really cool method,” Jess said. “The eye lens grows in concentric spherical layers, building on itself over time. And when you dissect this tissue, you can look through time into how the fish moved through the food web.”

Jess Diallo

This method allows Jess to see clear shifts in diet throughout an individual’s life, for example from a juvenile fish eating insects, to growing larger and graduating up to eating other fish. Food consumption provides a clear signature in stable isotope analysis, and Jess is interested in exploring how invasive and native fish interact in the food web throughout their lifetime, and the comparison with native fish-only communities.

Studying five species of fish in total, Jess has seen some clear results from the stable isotope data she has collected. “The lifetime trophic trajectories of native fish species are, on average, displaced within the food web when they’re in streams containing invasive species, compared to native-only communities,” Jess shared.

This displacement is seen in lower values of Carbon-13 and Nitrogen-15, meaning a dietary shift from terrestrial to aquatic plant carbon sources and a lower position on the food chain.

Beka Stiling

Sharing why some streams are inhabited by native-only fish and others have the presence of invasive species, Jess noted that it’s down to the hydrology and climate of the area: “Burro Creek has intermittent streams that flow when there’s rainfall, but become isolated pools during the dry season. This fragmented system means that when invasive fish were introduced in a reservoir on the lower Bill Williams River, their progress upstream was slowed by dry stream sections.”

Another area of Jess’ work is using otoliths, the ear stones of fish which can be used to age them, to link the chronological record of stable isotope values to time. “These two parts of a fish, their eye lenses and their otoliths, are two records of a fish’s lifetime. This is really novel research, linking the otoliths to eye lenses, especially for community ecology, so it’s really exciting work to be involved in,” she said.

Jess Diallo

Jess wants to be able to take all of the individual fish and different species present in the river and put them all on the same timescale. “This is where both methods come in. The fragile, crystalline structure of fish eye lenses mean you can only measure the size of each layer as it’s peeled back, a bit like an onion. These measurements are proportional to fish body size,” she shared. “By using otolith data too, we hope to be able to go from fish body size to fish age and shed insight into the impact of things like season and hydrology on the food web”.

Jess Diallo

“This work has really highlighted for me the beauty in the tiny things –  fish eye lenses, otoliths – and the wealth of information they hold,” Jess said about her research. It has also been an important learning experience when conducting science. Not only did Jess conduct her research in an area facing a myriad of different factors such as water extraction and different land use issues between private and government entities, adding in fish conservation presented a new optic.

“My research was also a steep learning curve and I hope to be able to share new methods and best practices in the future,” Jess said. “This type of research combining stable isotope data from fish eye lenses with otoliths hasn’t been done before, and trying to figure out the best way to peel an eye lens or polish a lapillar otolith taught me an awful lot about these species.” Dissecting at least 400 fish and working on between 1-15 tissue samples from each one, Jess hopes to contribute her learnings through a methods paper to other researchers in the fish ecology field.