Do you want to learn about wao and land-use planning?
Join us at the Hawaiʻi Conservation Conference for a collaborative forum focused on reimagining Hawaiʻi’s land and water systems. We will explore new ways of planning and restoring landscapes guided by ʻike kūpuna (ancestral knowledge). In this forum, research partners from four working groups will share their ongoing research, preliminary findings, and an initial outline for a proof of concept.
“Project Wao: Developing a Methodology for Societal Cross-Sector Land-Use Planning and Indigenously Informed Watershed Restoration”
July 23, 2025 | 8:15 – 10:15 a.m.
Hawaiʻi Convention Center, Room 311
Presenters
Kamuela Plunkett, Elliot Parsons, and Gina McGuire
Abstract
Project Wao takes a co-production approach to spatially mapping historic vegetation patterning, allowing for a comparative analysis of land systems in Hawaiʻi and their general corollary effects on land cover change and watershed biodiversity over time. However, in order to perform a comparative systems analysis, Project Wao and its research partners are currently developing an interdisciplinary set of research questions and methods for reconstructing wao (uninhabited and uncultivated land areas) various vegetative communities) and pōʻai (climate-environmental bands encircling mountains delineated by vegetation patterning and land-use). The targeted period for patterning reconstruction is between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
The systemic goals of Project Wao are to produce geo-spatial maps that promote societal protection of existing native watershed vegetation, cross-sector restoration of lost native land cover, and to provide Hawai‘i a vision for what Aloha ‘Āina-based land-use planning may look like. The geographic scope for this pilot study is West Hawaiʻi Island, spanning the moku(s) of Kohala and Kona, along with particular ahupuaʻa case studies.
In this forum, research partners from four working groups will share their ongoing research, preliminary findings, and an initial outline for a proof of concept. The working groups for Project Wao include the following: Land-Use Systems Background and Comparative Analysis, the Bio-Cultural Watershed, the Academic Watershed, and Ethno-Historic Land-Use – Language and Mapping. GIS Modeling is a working group that will be filled, and its scope of work informed, by the progress and findings of the working groups mentioned above.