Thais Bernos

Concordia University
Postdoctoral fellow candidate

Supervisor: Dylan Fraser
Louis Bernatchez, Universite Laval
Start: 2023-02-01
End: 2025-01-31
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Project

Biocultural diversity in harvested fisheries: developing decision-support tools to manage within-species diversity
I will work collaboratively with other conservation professionals including Indigenous and non-Indigenous parties to generate case studies, create practical resources for local and regional stewardship, and propose a new policy framework for the protection of irreplaceable components of Canadian biodiversity. I anticipate that these components—which respectively focus on Lake Trout as a flagship species, the conservation research-practice interface, and the conservation practice-policy interface—will jointly pave the way to simultaneously conserve biological diversity and people’s continued relationships with wildlife. Throughout this postdoctoral fellowship, I plan on using a biocultural lens to conservation, meaning that I will focus on the diversity of life in all its manifestation (e.g. biological and cultural) using an intentional, collaborative, and collective process to conservation. In the process, I will: ▪ coproduce research weaving Indigenous knowledge systems with western science to increase the resilience of Lake Trout biocultural inheritance. ▪ create resources to facilitate the integration of research results to local monitoring and management practices and empower indigenous-led conservation research leadership. ▪ develop a novel framework to embrace biocultural diversity in conservation policy.