Thank you for the opportunity.
I'll give you a very concrete example that refers to the longer baselines of indigenous knowledge and how they can benefit the process.
A colleague and I did an analysis of fishery-independent data that shows very rapid declines in the size and age structure of yelloweye rockfish. Those time series did not start until 2003, which is long after commercial fisheries had already caused tremendous declines in that and many other groundfish species.
If we just look at the picture that we analyzed between 2003 and 2015, from DFO's own survey data, we see a decline of about half a centimetre per year in the average size of yelloweye rockfish and an average decline of about 10 months per year in the average age of yelloweye rockfish. This has tremendous implications for fecundity, because larger females are disproportionally more fecund than smaller females per unit of body size.
This was in 2003, at the start of the time series. Looking at indigenous knowledge through structured interviews, we reconstructed the body sizes of yelloweye going back to the 1950s or so and how, in the catches of indigenous fishers, those sizes changed over time. Between 1980—which is before any of these scientific surveys had begun—and 2000, we see a decline of nearly half the average size.
If we only look at the scientific data, we will have a shifting baseline of what would have been considered normal. It would be starting in 2003, which is about half the body size and disproportionally lower fecundity that was there before the commercial fisheries got under way.
That's one example.