| 英文摘要: | This award is supported as Rapid Response Research (RAPID). The investigators plan to recover data that will be destroyed by a planned forest burn scheduled for Spring 2017. Pre and post-colonial period Native Americans actively managed their natural environments through the use of fire to produce grasslands and boost bison populations and this at risk data has the potential to provide critical insights into the natural resource management practices of Native North Americans from the 1600's to the present. A key element of the research is to use the recovered data to map the landscape of the Clear Water Valley in Alberta Canada and to estimate the population numbers of bison supported in the region historically to the present. Understanding the historic ecosystem and the bison populations in the region is a critical part of the decision to reintroduce bison species in the Rocky Mountain region. As a subsistence species utilized by early Native Americans for food, shelter, clothing, and religious practice, bison are a cultural and natural keystone species in the region. As a species hunted to near extinction by the late 1800's, currently, both public and Tribal land managers are considering projects to reintroduce bison into contemporary ecosystems. The researchers argue that after bison and traditional indigenous land management were removed from these ecosystems in the late 1800's the landscape substantially changed, to the point that it may no longer be suitable for bison reintroduction. The project will map, quantify, and provide insights into how Indigenous burning historically created habitats supporting substantial bison populations in the Rocky Mountains near Banff National Park (BNP) in Canada, which can be compared to other regions of the North where cultural burning was also practiced. In addition, the researchers will provide insights into the implications of these landscape transformations and their disappearance for the management of forests, fire, and fauna today.
The region for the RAPID is anticipated to be particularly well suited for study; 1) Banff National Park has a bison reintroduction program and 2) it is a region where Indigenous peoples, such as the Kootenai, historically used cultural burning to create open and nutrient-enriched grassy habitat for bison. Today, these and similar Rocky Mountain valleys are densely forested due to the exclusion of traditional indigenous burning, the introduction of modern fire suppression, and other factors. In order to assess and achieve bison restoration objectives similar to what existed historically, it is vital to quantify landscape condition during the period of traditional indigenous management. Coordination between fire management programs and bison reintroduction groups could benefit the interests of both groups and improve the odds of attaining bison population restoration goals.
This project will demonstrate and quantify changes in bison habitat by creating a 3D time-lapse map showing the transformation of the Clearwater Valley in Alberta, Canada from the 1600s to present. The research team will recreate the valley's fire history using modern dendrochronology, cross-dating tree scars left by historical fires. This phase of research will produce a stand age structure reconstruction, a traditional fire scar history using the program FHAES, a climate reconstruction (to determine the degree of anthropogenic vs. climatic influence on the fire regime(s) over time), a comparison of known historical human and bison population events (such as smallpox outbreaks) with fire frequency and tree recruitment shifts, and spatiotemporal GIS maps compiling all of the above. In addition, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will collect 3-dimensional landscape data to measure the valley's modern biotic landscape. A digital time-lapse map will incorporate the tree-ring history to extend the 3D landscape model back in time. Lastly, the investigators will derive estimates of how much biomass burning has changed over the course of the last 300+ years in the Clearwater Valley sample area.
The project's novel fusion of dendrochronology and 3D spatiotemporal GIS expands the realm of what is possible for scientific methodology across disciplinary boundaries. The results of this study will also be applicable across national boundaries by showing not only how much change in the landscape would be necessary for Banff National Park's bison restoration goals, but also demonstrate the need for similar investigations by land managers across North America. |