Ecological calendars to anticipate climate change and food security

Oneida Lake research group: Karim-Aly Kassam, Madeline Rich, Tamar Law, Iriel Edwards, Morgan Ruelle, Leo Louis, Alexandra Mantilla, Hayley Tessler, Randy Jackson, Lars Rudstam (Funded by the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Academic Venture Fund, the Belmont Forum (NSF USA), and CBFS)

This completed project, led by Professor Kassam, developed ecological calendars as a means of building anticipatory capacity to climate change at the scale of a community microclimate. Ecological calendars are systems to keep track of time-based observation, using all the senses of weather, plants, animals and insects. Seasonal events – such as the nascence of a flower, the emergence of an insect, the arrival of a migratory bird, the movement of fish, or the breakup of lake ice – may serve as more reliable indicators of seasonal change than counting of days based on the position of the sun, moon, and stars. Indigenous and other place-based ecological knowledge of seasonal indicators has enabled communities to coordinate their activities with the rest of their ecosystems. By integrating such knowledge with cutting-edge science, the project developed ecological calendars that anticipate trends and variability resulting from global climate change. This participatory action research project was designed and implemented in partnership with fishing and farming communities in the Oneida Lake Basin, as well as Dakota and Lakota First Nations in the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation of North and South Dakota and people in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang in collaboration with Chinese, German, and Italian scholars. The final reports have been completed and will be given to the Oneida community in early 2023. These reports for each community and their ecological calendar can be downloaded at: https://cornell.app.box.com/s/53qzqbt31ygpc1q4m3orlmyaiygjmh55. Furthermore, a special issue in GeoHealth, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, entitled Rhythms of the Earth: Ecological Calendars and Anticipating the Anthropogenic Climate Crisis is a transdisciplinary articulation of a methodology of hope to confront the challenge of multiple injustices of the climate crises. With over 10 scholarly articles, Rhythms of the Earth contains manuscripts related to ecological calendars from the Arctic to North Africa, ranging in time from the Roman Empire to contemporary Central Asia. Indigenous community members, artists, students, social and biophysical scientists, and scholars from the humanities have jointly authored and contributed their insights to this transdisciplinary collection on ecological calendars. These works will be available open access by January 2023: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)2471-1403.ECOCAL2021.