DISES: Restoring Indigenous Socio-Environmental Systems (RISES)

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

Indigenous practices influenced plant and animal distributions across the planet for thousands of years. Research shows that biodiversity and ecosystem health are often higher where Indigenous socio-environmental systems (SES) persist. Yet in many locations around the world, including North America, these dynamics were interrupted by colonial invasions. Centuries of intensive agriculture and industrial activities have altered ecosystems and eroded traditional relationships between Indigenous people and ecosystems. In this project a multidisciplinary team develops a framework for Restoring Indigenous Socio-Environmental Systems (RISES). This framework is applied to a restoration effort on Tribal land. The restoration is led by the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation in the Bear River Basin. The team is quantifying long-term Indigenous SES dynamics. They are modeling the drivers of SES change that are critical for conservation goals. That information is being disseminated to land managers and the public. In addition, the project trains many tribal youth, undergraduate, and graduate students. Uncovering past Indigenous SES dynamics is being accomplished through a convergence of enduring traditional knowledge, community ecology, historical ecology, archaeology, and paleoecology. Restoration of the dynamics takes place with the collaboration and shared leadership of Indigenous communities. These communities are typically left out of restoration projects to the detriment of both social and environmental systems. This project develops a generalizable convergence framework. That framework quantifies long-term socio-environmental dynamics, evaluates the drivers of change in the system, and synthesizes findings. It does so using statistical and process-based models that include estimates of uncertainty to evaluate the potential efficacy of alternative restoration scenarios under future climate regimes. Finally, it leverages the findings to engage community members, Indigenous secondary and university students, and land managers, all within a collaborative framework of shared knowledge generation and problem solving. Drawing on long-standing and emerging hypotheses across the natural and behavioral sciences, the project evaluates the drivers of SES dynamics. These include the role of gradual vs. stochastic processes on SES stability, resilience, and tipping points. They are being integrated in a framework capable of forecasting with estimates of uncertainty under future climate scenarios. 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.