We’re also working to tie our health back to the health of other species through the work on Cultural Indicator Species, indicative of the whole network health - humans and our more-than-human kin - in partnership with our key impact partner, the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University, Melbourne.

CIS is our re-imagining of the concept of ‘Keystone Species’ to incorporate Indigenous Systems Knowledge (ISK) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). It involves mapping symbiotic, relational land systems with humans in custodial/biological niche, alongside species that impact flows between natural systems globally and informs all human activities, and can be fractalised to map on to certain activities by certain groups, and scaled out from there to the whole.

Our work on CIS goes beyond the ecological metaphors. It is a suite of metrics for relational health, mapping the presence and strength of human relationships with Country, culture, and kin. This help us measure transformation in systems not just through data, but through the living systems within which these data sets emerge.