Biocultural adaptation of resource management traditions under the effects of climate change

Indigenous ecological knowledge is one critical aspect of cultural heritage that may provide a source of resiliency, mitigation, and adaptation to the effects of climate change. Cultural heritages relevant to changes induced by climate change include diverse forms of technical knowledge and social customs for resource use (i.e. use rights or ownership). Another fundamental characteristic for cultural heritage centers on the extent to which a specific cultural heritage is transmitted in a stable fashion across generations (vertical transmission) versus shared quickly amongst a network of contacts (horizontal transmission). Vertical transmission has the advantage of preserving hard-to-discover technical information and stabilizing resource use-rights to avoid conflict, while horizontal transmission enables the diffusion of technical innovations and new social arrangements. Proposed Research The proposed transdisciplinary research will apply cultural transmission models to study the vertical and horizontal transmission dynamics of cultural heritages at four comparative study sites: Hoonah AK, Zhetysu Kazakhstan, Chiapas Mexico, and Khovd Mongolia. We will marry these socio-cultural data to ecological data on the changes in resource distributions anticipated due to climate change, and then feed back this information to study site stakeholders and partners so they can consider whether they need to alter their traditional levels of vertical versus horizontal transmission for cultural heritage to account for changes brought on by a changing climate.