A three-pronged approach that leans on Indigenous knowledge for northern fish monitoring and conservation

Investigating whether changes within fish populations may result from harvesting requires a comprehensive approach, especially in more data-sparse northern regions. Our study took a three-pronged approach to investigate walleye population change by combining Indigenous knowledge (IK), phenotypic traits, and genomics. We thank Larson et al. (2020) for their critiques of our study; certainly, there are aspects of their critique that are warranted and merit further investigation. However, we argue that their critique is over-stated and misleading, primarily given that (a) one of three prongs of our research, IK, was dismissed in their assessment of our study's conclusions; (b) our Bayesian size-at-age modeling should help to mitigate sample size issues; (c) their re-analysis of our size-at-age data does not actually refute our results; (d) genomic changes that we observed are nascent; (e) the data file that Larson et al. (2020) used for their genomic re-analysis was not correct; and (f) criteria that Larson et al. (2020) use for their genomic re-analysis were not properly justified.