| There is a lack of information regarding critical habitat for many marine species, including the bearded seal, an important subsistence species for the indigenous residents of Bering Strait. An objective approach to modeling marine mammal habitat in polar regions using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Alaskan Native hunters is developed to address this gap. The approach substitutes lifetime and cross-generational knowledge of subsistence hunters and their harvest data for observational knowledge gained from formal scientific field surveys of marine mammal sightings. TEK information for summer and fall seasons was transformed to seal presence/absence and used to train Classification Tree Analyses (CTA) of environmental predictor variables to predict suitable habitat for bearded seal in Bering Strait. A Kappa of 0.883 was achieved for habitat classifications. The TEK information used is spatially restricted, but provides a viable, replicable alternative when Western scientific observational data is limited or non-existent. |
