NSF Convergence Accelerator Workshop: Coastal Biocultural Restoration as a Nexus for Innovation

This grant will support a virtual convergence workshop hosted from Hawaiʻi that brings together Indigenous and traditional communities, scientists from diverse fields, nonprofits, businesses, government, and more to develop project ideas and define priorities for use-inspired research and application coming out of ongoing collaborative efforts at rebuilding human relationships with coastal ecosystems based on the land and resource management practices of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities. The workshop contains four subtopics: resilience to flooding, tech-enabled coastal and waterway observation and data management, sustainable economic development, and higher education for Indigenous peoples in STEM and resource management.

The project ideas developed in the workshop will have the potential to benefit coastal communities’ disaster preparedness, economies, and success in STEM education for rural and Indigenous peoples.

Participants in the workshop will be facilitated through a series of meetings to ideate and describe possible deliverables growing out of ongoing coastal biocultural restoration efforts. Ideas should be backed by research, cutting edge/emerging/innovative by nature, fill gaps in existing coastal biocultural restoration activities or amplify/scale/leverage the results of coastal biocultural restoration for greater social or environmental impact, and may come from applications in different industries/disciplines and/or require collaboration across sectors.

Indigenous cultures are biocultural, meaning they developed historically as part of social-ecological systems and have developed generational, observation-based knowledge of how to manage local and regional resources sustainably. Applying, amplifying, and scaling Indigenous ecological knowledge can help address the compounding environmental crises we face in the 21st century.

Furthermore, Indigenous and traditional communities around the world have maintained sustainable management of or are working to restore traditional territories, creating biocultural restoration zones that offer opportunities to unlock innovations in natural resource management, resilience design, computational and network systems for data-driven decision-making, regenerative economic development, and inclusive and equitable higher education or workforce training for Indigenous peoples. In particular, coastal biocultural restoration is impactful because coasts and waterways form boundary zones of ecological and economic importance, and work in these zones can inform emerging coastal and fisheries management technologies, scientific progress in the geosciences, and sea level rise mitigation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.