Sam Gon

Samuel M. Ohukaniōhia Gon III is an American scientist and Hawaiian cultural practitioner, currently serving as Senior Scientist and Cultural Advisor for The Nature Conservancy of Hawaiʻi. He was born and raised in Nuʻuanu on the island of Oʻahu. Gon studied Hawaiian culture under Kumu John Keolamalaāinana Lake. Gon works to integrate Hawaiian culture, values, and knowledge into conservation efforts, for which he was named a Living Treasure of Hawaii for his contributions towards preserving Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian ecology.

Early life Gon was born in Honolulu Hawaiʻi on December 16, 1955, and graduated in 1973 from McKinley High School and earned a Bachelor's in Zoology (1978) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He continued his education at the University of California at Davis Gon managed biological inventories for the Conservancy and the state of Hawaii.

His work as the Director of the Hawaii Natural Heritage Program directed a team of biologists and data managers working to protect the rarest endemic species and ecosystems across all of the Hawaiian Islands by tracking their locations, management needs, and protection status. Later, he worked with the Conservancy's island programs strengthening conservation and management strategies. Gon helped establish ecological analysis and biodiversity data management systems for projects in East Asia, Latin America, Polynesia, and Micronesia. In 1991, Sam sailed on Hōkūleʻa around the Hawaiian Islands. He served on the board of the Ōhi'a Project, focused on Hawaiʻi's endemic and most abundant native tree. He was an executive committee member of the Hawaiian Conservation Alliance. Gon was a board member In 2015, while Gon was a part of the Board of Land and Natural Resources, he was an advocate for the protection of the native species, such as Oopu (Awaous stamineus) at risk of extinction.

Biocultural Conservation

Gon has been a strong advocate for biocultural conservation, melding indigenous Hawaiian knowledge, values, and practices into mainstream conservation. With the Hawaiʻi Conservation Alliance, he drafted the alliance's position paper on Hawaiian Culture in Conservation in Hawaiʻi, providing guidance to all conservation partners in multiple sectors (government, academia, and NGO) on integrating Hawaiian culture into conventional conservation practice. [section requires expansion and citations]

Research, publications and speeches Gon has given numerous presentations about Hawaiian ecosystems and culture to global audiences, such as the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of the American Indian, the Ethnological Museum in Dalem, Berlin, Germany (2011), the National Museum of Natural History in Paris (2012), and the Museum of World Culture in Paris, France (2014).

Gon has published many articles on Hawaiian natural history, conservation biology, landscape history, biocultural conservation, and sustainability, including [list of publications requires reorganization and corrections] altitudinal effects on the general diversity of endemic insect communities in Leeward Hawaiian forests (1978), invertebrate domestication (1984), water bears (1986), endemic Hawaiian plants (1987; 2008), sex-biased pattern variations in birds of prey (2003), applications of traditional Hawaiian knowledge (2008), using historic human ecological footprints to inform biocultural restoration and sustainability (2018), the Hawaiian Renaissance and global sustainability (2019), optimizing ecosystem services (2020), conservation of subterranean biomes (2021), and methodologies for exploring indigenous conceptualizations of nature and conservation (2022).

He is also the creator of a globally-recognized website on trilobite classification and biology Trilobites.info A Guide to the Orders of Trilobites

Publications