Sam Ohu Gon III

Samuel M. 'Ohukani'ōhi'a 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 Keolamala'āinana Lake. Gon works to integrate Hawaiian culture, values, and knowledge into conservation efforts, for which he was named a Living Treasure of Hawaii by the Honpa Hongwanji Mission 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 earning his Master's in Zoology (1980) and a PhD in animal behavior (1984), studying the Happy-face Spider, Theridion grallator.

Career
After attaining his Ph.D., Gon worked for a year in the Entomology Department of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, before being hired by The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii in 1986. In that organization, he served as an exploratory ecologist (1986-1990), Director of the Hawaiʻi Natural Heritage Program (1991-2002), and Senior Scientist and Cultural Advisor (2003-present) through his career, he orchestrated research and initiatives that supported The Conservancyʻs work to preserve Hawaii's biodiversity. Gon managed biological inventories for the Conservancy and the state of Hawaii.

His work as the Director of the Hawai'i 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 strenthening 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 for Ahahui Malama i ka Lokahi which is a native Hawaiian organization conserving native plants and animals in Hawaii, and for the Kaho'olawe Island Reserve Commission with a focus on habitat restoration. 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 O'opu (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).

In 2014 Gon gave a TedTalk on Maui on combining science and Hawaiian cultural practices. Gon and colleagues at The Nature Conservancy of Hawaiʻi and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs contributed to a collaborative effort calculating the ecological footprint of pre-contact Hawaiʻi.

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