Ecological and Cultural Pyrogeography

Nanavati, William Parashar, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Andrés Holz at Portland State University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the extent to which changes in the environment have influenced vegetation and the natural behavior of fire since the last ice age (<20,000 years ago). This project seeks to (1) build upon decades of socioecological research on the role of anthropogenic fire in shaping the landscapes; (2) refine our understanding of fire behavior through the comparison lake and tree-ring fire records; and (3) provide datasets that can be used to parameterize, validate, and compare with LPJ-GUESS-LMfire dynamic global vegetation model simulations. This project will also promote diversity in the field by supporting undergraduate research assistants from a diverse range of socioeconomic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. Although it is well established that early land use altered ecosystem dynamics, the spatial and temporal scales at which this was done is still debated. Disentangling anthropogenic and natural drivers of change in past vegetation and fire regimes is a fundamental challenge. Addressing this challenge is imperative for understanding the extent to which humans have modified temperate ecosystems, primarily through deforestation, agriculture, and burning. This multidisciplinary project seeks to advance the scientific knowledge of how human land use altered ecosystem dynamics across the steep forest-grassland ecotone. To address the research objectives of this project, new lacustrine sediment and tree cores will be analyzed. Collecting lake cores will fill a biogeographic knowledge gap in these ecosystems and targeting lakes near archaeological sites in this region offer the opportunity to detect human activity in the sedimentary record. New charcoal and pollen records and their integration with new and existing dendroecological records will provide comparisons of fire and vegetation histories across productivity and land-use gradients, allowing us to understand regional ecosystem dynamics and the spatial and temporal scales at which land use becomes evident. The comparison of paleoecological data with LPJ-GUESS-LMfire simulations will provide an excellent way to test hypotheses about human influence on natural fire regimes. By providing a better understanding of landscape history, this project will facilitate the pragmatic selection of management objectives and conservation targets by identifying which ecosystems will benefit the most form active management, which ecosystems will likely persist without intervention, and which ecosystems are likely to fail regardless of management practices. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.