Université de Montréal
Candidat Chercheur(e) invité(e) / Invited researcher
superviseur(e): Katalin Patonai
Début: 2026-09-20
Fin: 2026-12-18

Projet

Integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Food-Web Science in a Qualitative Loop Model of Lake Victoria's Fisheries Governance
Lake Victoria supports the livelihoods of millions of people, yet its fisheries face collapsing stocks, eutrophication, invasive species, and governance that is fragmented across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Existing food-web models of the lake treat governance and local knowledge as external inputs, and the only published socio-ecological loop model of Lake Victoria (Downing et al. 2014) represents society as a single aggregated variable. This project develops a qualitative loop analysis model that addresses that gap. The model has 18 nodes and 37 directional links. Five nodes form a trophic cascade (primary producers, Nile tilapia, Omena, haplochromine cichlids, Nile perch), with diets verified against FishBase and published Ecopath and Atlantis studies. Seven nodes represent governance and livelihood dynamics, including enforcement equity, community self-governance, and women's participation in resource governance. These nodes are built from twelve months of participatory fieldwork with fishers at Muhuru Bay and Migingo Island (N = 133), in which two fishers are co-authors. Fishers' observations, including the locally identified pollution zone Osikonyodho and the cryptic recovery of haplochromine cichlids, enter the model as signed links on the same footing as published trophic evidence, each carrying a confidence rating. Using an R implementation of Levins-style loop analysis, press-perturbation scenarios (for example improved enforcement equity, restored lunar closures, and intensified catchment land conversion) will identify leverage points and test whether model predictions match fishers' reported adaptive responses. The findings will feed a comparative analysis with Canadian Indigenous research governance (TCPS2 Chapter 9, UNDRIP). The work is supervised by Dr. Katalin Patonai (Université de Montréal) and Prof. Zsolt Molnár (ELTE) and is supported by a Mitacs Globalink Research Award.

Mots-clés

Traditional Ecological Knowledge, qualitative loop analysis, socio-ecological systems, Lake Victoria, fisheries governance, food web, signed digraph, press perturbation, Nile perch, community self-governance, Indigenous research ethics