Indigenous Indicator Prioritization Key Questions Report

The definition of a monitoring question is among the most difficult tasks in establishing a monitoring program, but also among the most crucial (Arciszewski et al., 2017; Likens & Lindenmayer, 2018). Indigenous communities of the Wood Buffalo Indigenous Sub-Caucus are interested in how the Oil Sands Monitoring Program (OSMP) can address their concerns regarding oil sands development in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region. This means clearly defining what key questions the communities expect core monitoring to address. The OSMP has had a suite of key monitoring questions that have been converging on questions that are more targeted and tractable. However, they remain quite broad and can support a wide variety of monitoring approaches. The communities of the Wood Buffalo Indigenous Sub-Caucus engaged with their members from February 2024 - March 2025 to identify which key questions, monitoring principles, locations and indicators they would like core monitoring to address. We summarized that feedback to four key principles, conceptual models, and a suite of key monitoring questions for air, aquatics, and terrestrial biodiversity monitoring. Indigenous communities are interested in monitoring that tracks stressors and effects, that includes measures of how they experience the landscape, that have a link to compliance monitoring, and have the potential to inform environmental management. This report, with the Gap Analysis and Knowledge Translation Reports, forms the basis of work intended to more clearly define how the OSMP core monitoring can address Indigenous concerns.