Published July 31, 2025

Community members weren’t surprised when Rowenna Gryba, a senior science policy advisor for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, showed them results from her seal study off the Alaskan coast. At the time, she was a marine ecologist for a consulting company, working with the community on a tagging project

“I was showing them these maps of where I had modeled, where spotted seals and bearded seals were doing feeding activities. I had spent months and months and months doing all this analysis, and in the room they were like ‘oh yeah, we know that, that makes sense’,” she recalls. “I was the only one in the room who this was news to.”

After spending endless hours capturing, tagging, counting, and analyzing the seals to learn about their movements and feeding habits, Gryba realized locals possessed a vast wealth of knowledge beyond what Western scientific methods could produce. So she set out to find a way to utilize Indigenous Knowledge in habitat modeling, which is used in species conservation and management.

When Gryba was a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, she teamed with Iñupiat hunters and other colleagues to conduct research. They recently published their findings in PNAS, a worldwide authoritative source of high-impact, original research. Gryba’s team aims to develop a statistical approach to utilize Indigenous Knowledge in habitat modeling for wildlife species.

The study’s authors define Indigenous Knowledge as “interconnected and systematic knowledge about abiotic and biotic systems and the relationships of those systems with cultural and spiritual aspects of life.”

Working with hunters from near Utqiagvik, Alaska, including several who are co-authors on the study, Gryba and collaborators focused on ringed seals as the case study for the paper. The authors wrote that their study developed “a framework that uses Indigenous Knowledge as sole source of information (i.e., no other species observation data) to statistically estimate species habitat selection.”

This methodology can be applied even to dynamic habitats (such as sea ice), and it works well with complex relationships between species and their habitats. It can be used for a range of purposes, including mapping the presence of species, estimating habitat use, and identifying areas important for conservation.

“Indigenous people have always conserved and done species management,” Gryba said, noting that fully incorporating this knowledge in Western practices is an area that still needs progress. “That’s really where this started… How can we provide another avenue for Indigenous Knowledge to be included in Western conservation and species management?”

Indigenous Knowledge Holders identified ice concentration, currents, distance from shore, and spatial regions as key factors to focus on. Gryba and colleagues used semi-structured interviews, similar to a conversation, to gather information from hunters. Her team asked where seals were observed, and the types of habitats associated with their presence.

The researchers gathered quantitative, qualitative, and spatial knowledge from the interviewees.

To turn these interviews into statistics needed for modeling, the researchers developed methods and models to convert each hunter’s association of seals with a specific covariate (such as a specific amount of ice concentration) to establish the probability of seals being present. For example, they found that eight out of nine hunters interviewed said seals were associated with nearshore habitats, while three out of nine associated the seals with offshore habitats. These proportions established the probabilities used for modeling.

“We miss so much if we only focus on Western science approaches, and that is not a trivial thing,” Gryba said.

According to Gryba, researchers work hard to collect data sets and make them as large and representative as possible to inform species conservation and management. However, “It was so clearly apparent how much more understanding the Knowledge Holders had, how in-depth that knowledge was about these species, and how clear it was of how much we’re missing.”

One of the issues with using Western data collection methods as the sole source of knowledge gathering is the challenge of collecting sufficient data to ensure true representativeness.

Capturing and tagging ice-associated seals is difficult, often resulting in relatively small sample sizes. Those tags are also limited in what data they can gather; they work well for information on movement, but only for limited time periods before they fall off. Methods, such as aerial surveying, provide only a very brief glimpse of seal behaviour.

“Biases due to small sample sizes and short temporal scales are often present in Western scientific studies,” she said.“Because Indigenous Knowledge includes collective knowledge obtained over countless interactions across multigenerational time scales, these biases tend not to be present.”

According to Gryba, Knowledge Holders have a population-level understanding, and their observations can also reveal critical information about interactions with other species.

“They’re not just observing a seal on a particular day. They’re observing seals throughout every season, and when they’re hunting whales, they’re still observing other animals,” she said. “It’s not like they’re solely focused on a single species because they’re out on the land and on the water pretty much consistently throughout the year… their understanding is not just a snapshot of time, but across all the seasons.”

The information these individuals possess is also cumulative, increasing over time as they incorporate observations from other hunters and build their knowledge through generations.

“I’m really thankful that the Knowledge Holders were willing to take this step with me into this process, even though it is this extractive approach,” she says, highlighting that the work was done with oversight, review, and informed consent from local hunters.

Gryba and colleagues are now focusing on bearded seals in the waters near Utqiagvik. Bearded seals are massive, weighing up to 360 kg, and their size makes them difficult to capture and tag. The researchers hope to publish some of their work, which will include Indigenous Knowledge from its inception, later this year.