A bioavailable strontium (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) isoscape for Aotearoa New Zealand: Implications for food forensics and biosecurity

As people, animals and materials are transported across increasingly large distances in a globalized world, threats to our biosecurity and food security are rising. Aotearoa New Zealand is an island nation with many endemic species, a strong local agricultural industry, and a need to protect these from pest threats, as well as the economy from fraudulent commodities. Mitigation of such threats is much more effective if their origins and pathways for entry are understood. We propose that this may be addressed in Aotearoa using strontium isotope analysis of both pests and products. Bioavailable radiogenic isotopes of strontium are ubiquitous markers of provenance that are increasingly used to trace the origin of animals and plants as well as products, but currently a baseline map across Aotearoa is lacking, preventing use of this technique. Here, we have improved an existing methodology to develop a regional bioavailable strontium isoscape using the best available geospatial datasets for Aotearoa. The isoscape explains 53% of the variation (R² = 0.53 and RMSE = 0.00098) across the region, for which the primary drivers are the underlying geology, soil pH, and aerosol deposition (dust and sea salt). We tested the potential of this model to determine the origin of cow milk produced across Aotearoa. Predictions for cow milk (n = 33) highlighted all potential origin locations that share similar ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values, with the closest predictions averaging 7.05 km away from their true place of origin. These results demonstrate that this bioavailable strontium isoscape is effective for tracing locally produced agricultural products in Aotearoa. Accordingly, it could be used to certify the origin of Aotearoa’s products, while also helping to determine if new pest detections were of locally breeding populations or not, or to raise awareness of imported illegal agricultural products

Gender Perspective in Fisheries: Examples from the South and the North: Analysis and Practice

International audienceWomen have an active role in fisheries and aquaculture all over the world where fisheries activities related to resources, like fish, shell, and seaweed, take place. Women’s participation in fisheries is diverse as they are involved in different ways depending on the cultural, social, and material conditions. In Western areas, women’s contribution has mostly been performed on land, while in Southern areas, more examples of women fishing or collecting shells are found. However, everywhere, women in fisheries have either fewer rights than men or completely lack formal rights and political attention. Knowledge about women’s roles, gender relations, women’s ways of life in fishing areas, and the changes women and men face, is scarce and varied but necessary in order to conduct transdisciplinary research. Studies within social and cultural fishery research, most often carried out by means of qualitative methods, try to get deeper into women’s lives, their actions or practices, identities, their relations with men, and how women and men as categories are constructed, most often within a specific timespan and places. Constructing gender and gender relations differs from gender as a variable in the fields of fisheries and aquaculture. Both approaches are applied, but highlight different aspects and gender issues in fishery-related societies. An integrated gender dimension in transdisciplinary approaches is necessary to achieve sustainability of resources and society, by bringing together scientists working on different areas and different stakeholders to find responses to major problems