Marginalized communities, including Indigenous populations, experience climate change at a more extreme rate given where they live, despite their knowledge of and connection to the land. Due to this interconnection, there have been many negative impacts on cultural identities in correlation with climate change. For example, Indigenous communities that continue growing food, hunting and foraging on traditional lands now face increasingly limited resources due to changes in the land itself. To better understand Tribal experiences with our changing climate, this qualitative research study involved talking circles with Tribal members in the Colorado Plateau region of the United States. Specifically, our diverse research team aimed to identify and highlight Tribal perceptions of climate change, community, and education within the Colorado Plateau. This region, also known as the Four Corners, includes parts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The land is home to many Tribes with regional ancestral ties, including, but not limited to, Hopi, Navajo (Diné), Havasupai, Hualapai, White Mountain Apache, Ute Mountain, Southern Ute, and Kaibab. We hosted four Tribal talking circles in this region to better understand Indigenous perspectives of climate change, local solutions, and lessons learned from collaborating with Indigenous communities. We partnered with the Nature Conservancy’s Native American Tribes Upholding Restoration and Education (NATURE) program based out of Bears Ears National Monument to conduct this research. Results were used to guide curriculum development for the NATURE program and can provide invaluable insight for those wishing to collaborate with Tribal members on climate resilience.
more »
« less
Plant species richness at archaeological sites suggests ecological legacy of Indigenous subsistence on the Colorado Plateau
Humans have both intentional and unintentional impacts on their environment, yet identifying the enduring ecological legacies of past small-scale societies remains difficult, and as such, evidence is sparse. The present study found evidence of an ecological legacy that persists today within an semiarid ecosystem of western North America. Specifically, the richness of ethnographically important plant species is strongly associated with archaeological complexity and ecological diversity at Puebloan sites in a region known as Bears Ears on the Colorado Plateau. A multivariate model including both environmental and archaeological predictors explains 88% of the variation in ethnographic species richness (ESR), with growing degree days and archaeological site complexity having the strongest effects. At least 31 plant species important to five tribal groups (Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, and Apache), including the Four Corners potato ( Solanum jamesii ), goosefoot ( Chenopodium sp.), wolfberry ( Lycium pallidum ), and sumac ( Rhus trilobata ), occurred at archaeological sites, despite being uncommon across the wider landscape. Our results reveal a clear ecological legacy of past human behavior: even when holding environmental variables constant, ESR increases significantly as a function of past investment in habitation and subsistence. Consequently, we suggest that propagules of some species were transported and cultivated, intentionally or not, establishing populations that persist to this day. Ensuring persistence will require tribal input for conserving and restoring archaeo-ecosystems containing “high-priority” plant species, especially those held sacred as lifeway medicines. This transdisciplinary approach has important implications for resource management planning, especially in areas such as Bears Ears that will experience greater visitation and associated impacts in the near future.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1714972
- PAR ID:
- 10297926
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 118
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e2025047118
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Ecological impacts associated with ant introductions have received considerable attention, but most studies that report on these impacts contrast species assemblages between invaded and uninvaded sites. Given the low inferential power of this type of space-for-time comparison, alternative approaches are needed to evaluate claims that ant invasions drive native species loss. Here, we use long-term data sets from two different Argentine ant eradication programs on the California Channel Islands to examine how the richness and composition of native ant assemblages change before and after invasion (but prior to the initiation of treatments). At four different sites on two different islands, pre-invasion native ant assemblages closely resembled those at uninvaded (control) sites in terms of species richness, species composition, and the presence of multiple indicator species. Invader arrival coincided with large (> 75%) and rapid (within 1 year) declines in species richness, shifts in species composition, and the loss of indicator species. These impacts will hopefully be reversed by the recolonization of formerly invaded areas by native ant species following Argentine ant treatment, and long-term studies of native ant recovery at these sites are ongoing. Unchecked spread of the Argentine ant on other islands in this archipelago, however, poses a grave threat to native ants, which include a number of endemic taxa.more » « less
-
Experimental warming weakens positive plant diversity effects on pitfall trap sampled ant diversity.Abstract Ants are important components of many terrestrial ecosystems because of their high abundance, their central position in food webs, and because they can strongly influence ecosystem properties such as soil aeration, nutrient cycling, and plant community composition. Moreover, ants are also known to respond strongly to changes in environmental and biological conditions. In particular, two major anthropogenic environmental impacts – climate change and the loss of primary producers – may have interactive effects on ant communities. To examine this potential interaction, we quantified pitfall trap sampled ant diversity and activity across a fully factorial experiment manipulating temperature and grassland plant species richness at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in Minnesota, USA. Consistent with previous arthropod studies, we found a significant increase in sampled ant diversity in plots with higher sown plant species richness, such that plots with the largest number of plant species also had the highest sampled ant diversity. However, the strength of this relationship declined significantly in experimentally warmed subplots, especially when considered for higher aggregated spatial scales of samples. Taken together, these results suggest that the positive effects of plant diversity on sampled ant diversity may be partially undermined under warmer conditions.more » « less
-
more » « less
Abstract Ecological communities typically contain more species when located within geologically older regions. This pattern is traditionally attributed to the long‐term accumulation of species in the regional species pool, with local species interactions playing a minor role. We provide evidence suggesting a more important role of local species interactions than generally assumed. We assembled 320 communities of root‐associated fungi under 80 species pools, varying species pool richness and the mean age of the sites from which the fungi were collected across a 4‐myr soil chronosequence. We found that local diversity increased more with increasing species pool richness when species were from older sites. We also found that older species pools had lower functional and phylogenetic diversity, indicating greater competitive equivalence among species. Our results suggest that older regions have higher local richness not simply because older pools are more speciose but also because species have evolved traits that allow them to locally co‐occur.
-
more » « less
Abstract Fire has a major impact on the structure and function of many ecosystems globally. Pyrodiversity, the diversity of fires within a region (where diversity is based on fire characteristics such as extent, severity, and frequency), has been hypothesized to promote biodiversity, but changing climate and land management practices have eroded pyrodiversity. To assess whether changes in pyrodiversity will have impacts on ecological communities, we must first understand the mechanisms that might enable pyrodiversity to sustain biodiversity, and how such changes might interact with other disturbances such as drought. Focusing on plant–pollinator communities in mixed‐conifer forest with frequent fire in Yosemite National Park, California, we examine how pyrodiversity, combined with drought intensity, influences those communities. We find that pyrodiversity is positively related to the richness of the pollinators, flowering plants, and plant–pollinator interactions. On average, a 5% increase in pyrodiversity led to the gain of approximately one pollinator and one flowering plant species and nearly two interactions. We also find that a diversity of fire characteristics contributes to the spatial heterogeneity (
β ‐diversity) of plant and pollinator communities. Lastly, we find evidence that fire diversity buffers pollinator communities against the effects of drought‐induced floral resource scarcity. Fire diversity is thus important for the maintenance of flowering plant and pollinator diversity and predicted shifts in fire regimes to include less pyrodiversity compounded with increasing drought occurrence will negatively influence the richness of these communities in this and other forested ecosystems. In addition, lower heterogeneity of fire severity may act to reduce spatial turnover of plant–pollinator communities. The heterogeneity of community composition is a primary determinant of the total species diversity present in a landscape, and thus, lower pyrodiversity may negatively affect the richness of plant–pollinator communities across large spatial scales.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025047118
