Working With Greenlandic Fishermen: A New Approach to Citizen Science

Abstract:

‘Leveraging Local Knowledge to Measure Greenland Fjords’ is a science project designed with local knowledge sharing and data collection at its core. Citizen Science can take many different forms but in each instance it incorporates active participation of the general public in science research through integrating outreach, instruction, information gathering and data exchange. The strongest projects focus on two-way information exchange with both the citizen scientist and the professional scientist learning when they share their knowledge.

Working in cooperation with both teachers and fishermen in a small local community in northwest Greenland, we collected novel oceanographic measurements from a small 5 m fishing boat in the local fjord. We established connections with the local school for developing education initiatives, sharing maps and other resources, and worked through the teachers to connect with the village residents. We hosted a community meeting to provide a forum for a two-way information exchange with the science team providing background on the research project and the local residents providing both narrative information on local environmental change over the last one to three decades, and more quantitative and immediately useful information on fjord depths, iceberg flow directions and timing of seasonal ice break up and move out.

The local fishermen were intimately familiar with the local environment, having intrinsically collected data on fjord depth from their regular lowering of fishing line to catch Greenlandic halibut, a benthic fish. For our first trip they worked with us locating the deep and shallow parts of the fjord from many seasons of watching icebergs ground on the shallow shoals, and showed us how to navigate into the ice packed glacial front through the dense ice mélange. The local community interest in the project and in learning how to use the equipment we had brought encouraged us to discuss a long-term data gathering relationship, with the fishermen at the center of the collection. They were interested in the findings, wanting to see how the water temperature might differ from surface to depth. The same data we are interested in for better understanding glacial change is data they seek to explain impacts they have seen in their own fishing and hunting over the last several decades.