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| Fire, Vegetation Change, and Human Settlement | |
| 项目编号 | 1740918 |
| Scott Mensing | |
| 项目主持机构 | Board of Regents, NSHE, obo University of Nevada, Reno |
| 开始日期 | 2017-08-15 |
| 结束日期 | 12/31/2022 |
| 英文摘要 | This project will study the extent to which forests were altered by Native Americans using fire to increase the number of trees available for food resources, such as acorns from oak trees, and to create open woodlands, which were preferred over the naturally denser forests. After the arrival of Europeans, fire suppression became common and forests closed-up and became denser than the open forests described at contact by early European explorers. Many researchers have suggested that the open forests found by Europeans were the result of fires started due to lightning and are generally not ascribed to Native American landscape manipulation. Distinguishing forest change caused by Native Americans from lightning fires has challenged scientists for a long time. Many U.S. national forests now are experiencing larger and more destructive forest fires that impact many species and threaten homes and property. One cause of these increased fires is the increased density of forests following fire suppression. Creating new policies that use prescribed fire to create a more open forest requires land managers to understand what pre-fire suppression forests looked like and what caused the forest canopy to remain open. Knowing whether the open forests encountered by the first European explorers were the result of natural fire or human set fire provides forest managers with information regarding which processes created those forest conditions. This information can then be used to manage modern forests and better protect them. This study will be conducted in collaboration with local Native American tribes and will serve undergraduate students from groups underrepresented in the sciences. Lightning-strike wildfires are a natural part of any ecosystem, and it is generally assumed that such fires are the primary determinant of forest structure. There is significant evidence, however, that despite the presence of natural fires, Native Americans regularly conducted controlled burns of the landscape to increase productivity of certain terrestrial resources as a means of sustaining high population densities. The investigators of this project will use pollen and charcoal analysis to reconstruct the last 2,000 years of forest history and compare it with independent climate history reconstructed from tree-ring studies to determine whether forest structure changes in a manner consistent with patterns of climate. The investigators hypothesize that if the abundance of tree types that Native Americans used for food resources but which required drier conditions and open habitat are found to have increased during cool wet periods, then the most likely cause would be increased fires set by Native Americans through traditional resource-management practices. The investigators will use ecological models to test whether fires caused by lightning alone could have produced specific forest changes or whether human-set fires also were needed. The investigators will compare the timing of forest changes with the archaeological record of Native Americans to confirm whether the changes in forest structure coincide with more intense use of resources. This project will investigate these questions through a case study in the Sierra Nevada of California, but the research insights will be applicable to national forest lands throughout the United States where forest fire management is a public concern. |
| 资助机构 | US-NSF |
| 项目经费 | $300,000.00 |
| 项目类型 | Standard Grant |
| 国家 | US |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 文献类型 | 项目 |
| 条目标识符 | http://gcip.llas.ac.cn/handle/2XKMVOVA/212905 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Scott Mensing.Fire, Vegetation Change, and Human Settlement.2017. |
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