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Filters: Tags: {"type":"CMS Themes","name":"indigenous peoples"} (X) > Tags: {"type":"CMS Themes","name":"drought, fire and extreme weather"} (X)

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For the past few years, “king tides,” or the highest tides of the year, have been occurring more frequently and significantly affecting coastal environments across Hawaiʻi. Now, disappearing beaches and waves crashing over roadways are seemingly the “new normal.” In response, the state of Hawaiʻi is implementing adaptation strategies to combat tidal flooding in coastal areas. While flood management strategies are being implemented in urban areas, less is known about how tidal flooding, and associated inundation into surface and groundwater, might influence watershed dynamics and the native animals that depend on estuarine environments where freshwater meets the sea. Efforts for biocultural restoration of ecosystem...
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Fire has always been a part of life in southern California. Climate change and current fire management practices have led to catastrophic losses and impacts to human health, infrastructure and ecosystems, as seen, for example, in the 2018 Montecito debris flow. Indigenous wisdom instructs that rather than suppressing fire, we should seek to be in good relationship with fire. This project centers the voices of Chumash people by revitalizing their good relationship with fire in Chumash homelands. This revitalization comes at a critical time for both fire management and revitalization of Indigenous cultural burning practices in the southwest. The project will enable the recovery and documenting of Chumash knowledge...
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Agriculture and agroforestry (tree cultivation) are important activities for the Marshall Islands and other small islands to ensure food security and human health. The Marshallese have a long tradition of interplanting food-producing trees such as coconuts, breadfruit, and pandanus with bananas and root and vegetable crops. Locally grown food crops support community self-sufficiency, promote good nutrition, and can also serve as windbreaks and stabilize shorelines to lessen storm damage and erosion. However, climate change is posing serious challenges for growers, as they struggle to adapt to climate impacts including saltwater intrusion, changing precipitation and temperature patterns, and the spread of invasive...
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There is increasing and broad recognition of the importance of Indigenous and local knowledge in leading climate change adaptation. Indigenous peoples and nations are on the front lines of climate change impacts, yet they are also leading the way in many innovative adaptation actions, such as traditional or cultural burning practices - a form of low-intensity understory-burning that promotes ecosystem health and builds cultural resilience. The overarching goal of this project is to better understand and establish traditional burning as a robust adaptation strategy, based on the practice’s own merits and/or as a complementary approach to other conventional ecosystem restoration practices. Focusing on central California,...
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Healthy forests in the western United States provide multiple benefits to society, including harvestable timber, soil stabilization, and habitat for wildlife. On the Navajo Nation, over 5 million acres of forest provide wood that heats 50% of homes, building materials, summer forage for livestock, and drinking water. However, warming temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns can increase forests’ vulnerability to insect outbreaks and catastrophic wildfire. Forest managers, particularly those associated with tribal communities that depend on forests to maintain a subsistence lifestyle, need knowledge-based tools in order to reduce the impacts of climate change on forests. This project aims to study approximately...
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Indigenous peoples and nations are on the front lines of climate change impacts and are leading the way in innovative adaptation action, such as in the use of traditional burning. Traditional burning has been recognized as a robust adaptation strategy, increasing the resiliency of ecosystems and the local communities that depend on them for their economic and social well-being. Furthermore, implementing natural fire practices may help reduce the likelihood of catastrophic fires and increase ecosystem water holding capacity. Traditional burning may be applied singularly or as a complementary approach with other ecosystem restoration practices, such as thinning and prescribed burning. The overarching goal of this...
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The Gulf of Mexico coast of Louisiana and Texas faces threats from increasingly destructive extreme weather, heat, subsidence, and coastal erosion. Inland areas also face stronger storms, floods, and shifts in land development patterns. Increasing drought and extreme heat in Texas and New Mexico also exacerbate fires and floods. All of these regions are culturally rich, rapidly changing areas where people are working across political boundaries and organizations to protect and adapt people’s lifeways, sites and artifacts, and culturally important species, places and landscapes. This project will produce an action plan that describes ongoing efforts and identifies gaps in research and funding for cultural preservation...
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The Pueblo de San Ildefonso is facing increased wildfire risk under climate change. Recent fires have not only burned culturally significant sites, but they have also resulted in a loss of watershed runoff retention, which has increased erosion and the transport of contaminated sediments and soils on Pueblo lands from the adjacent Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). A priority for the Pueblo is to ensure that wildfires are managed appropriately and, when large fires do occur, that effective measures are taken to control the aftermath of increased flooding and erosion. This project will build on the knowledge of elders and the community to develop a study plan (or study method) to evaluate different landscape...
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Hawai‘i’s isolation, paired with limited water resources, make the archipelago sensitive to reductions in water availability. Drought can take different forms, varying across Island geographies with respect to frequency, intensity, duration, and extent. A drought event can exert hydrological, agricultural, ecological, and socio-economic impacts – and these impacts have been growing over the past century as droughts have become more frequent and severe. While the impacts of drought in Hawai‘i have been recently documented, important gaps remain in understanding these dynamics when engaging with multiple other stressors such as invasive species, shifting fire and climate patterns, pests, and pathogens. In particular,...
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Several times during the severe drought of 2010-2015, communities within the jurisdictional territories of the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma were precariously close to running out of water. According to previous studies, temperatures are expected to continue to rise throughout the southern states, and droughts are predicted to be longer and more severe. Even small changes to a river’s water flow regime may have unanticipated consequences on the water resources, especially for communities that rely on direct river diversions to supply their needs. A suitable water availability model is a key tool needed to help communities investigate where vulnerabilities in water resources may occur and the...
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Despite the pandemic, Future of Fire postdoc Dr. Nina Fontana developed and contributed to a range of projects with cultural fire practitioners from 2021-2023. This funding will provide her an additional year to complete and grow projects started with partners as a Future of Fire fellow. Fontana’s work focuses on two broad areas: (1) improving best practices in teaching and learning about cultural fire, and (2) developing culturally relevant decision support tools to support cultural fire practitioners. Fontana will continue to develop and assess group experiential learning and practices that expand cultural fire education for different audiences. She will also continue her collaborations with tribal partners...
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During the severe drought of 2010-2015, several communities in southeast Oklahoma almost ran out of water. Some of these communities rely on streams and rivers as their sole source of water and when these sources almost ran dry, it left them searching for alternatives and wondering how to continue growing, economically, with this water uncertainty. The possibility of climate change has these communities further concerned, primarily because they do not know what to expect. Previously, the USGS, both Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations collaborated on a project to apply a range of possible climate change scenarios to the Red River watershed to determine future water availability. This study will focus specifically on southeast...
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The Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center (NW CASC) advances actionable science relevant to today’s emerging climate-related risks by supporting research by early-career NW CASC Fellows. The NW CASC’s Research Fellowship Program enables graduate students and postdocs from a variety of scientific backgrounds to co-produce actionable science in collaboration with regional natural resource managers and decision-makers. Fellows receive support for research aligned with the NW CASC Science Agenda, as well as instruction in the principles and practices of co-production of decision-relevant, or actionable, science. The NW CASC University Consortium’s Research Fellowship Program supports climate adaptation research...
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Pinyon-juniper woodlands are important ecosystems in the western U.S. that provide numerous critical environmental, economic, and cultural benefits. For example, pinyon pines are a significant cultural resource for multiple Native American Tribes and provide necessary habitat for plants and wildlife (including at risk species, such as the pinyon-jay). Despite their importance, stress put on pinyon-juniper woodlands by wildfires and other interacting effects of climate change are causing major population declines of these woodland trees. Such changes to pinyon-juniper woodlands lead to uncertainty for land managers on best practices for protecting these ecosystems from stand replacing fire (where most or all of...
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Cherokee Peoples have had a sustained presence in the southern Appalachians over the past 12,000 years, with a peak population of about 250,000 people inhabiting approximately 32 million hectares across Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Early contact with European settlers caused drastic population declines and land loss, due to disease, land cession, and the relocation of people to western reservations. Today, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) comprises 16,000 citizens who maintain approximately 24,000 hectares of land known as the Qualla Boundary. The EBCI hold a distinct perspective informed by a multi-generational connection to place and to a collective...
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The Squaxin Island Tribe (SIT) is descended from maritime people who have lived and prospered along the shores of the southernmost inlets of the Salish Sea for millennia. Climate change is projected to result in lower low water flows, higher peak water temperatures, and bigger and more frequent floods, due to both changes in peak flows and sea level rise. These changes could have significant impacts for salmon and other fish populations, while also putting key Tribal properties and enterprises at risk. Given the potential for climate change to exacerbate existing threats on salmon populations, it is necessary to quantify climate change impacts to inform effective restoration and conservation plans. The project...
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Climate change is altering the patterns and characteristics of fire across natural systems in the United States. Resource managers in the Southwest are faced with making natural resource and fire management decisions now, despite a lack of accessible information about how those decisions will play out as fire regimes, and their associated disturbances, will change across the landscape. Decision makers in natural-resource management increasingly require information about projected future changes in fire regimes to effectively prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts. An accessible and forward-looking summary of what we know about the “future of fire” is urgently required in the Southwest and across the country...
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The Wind River Indian Reservation in west-central Wyoming is home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, who reside near and depend on water from the streams that feed into the Wind River. In recent years, however, the region has experienced frequent severe droughts, which have impacted tribal livelihoods and cultural activities. Scientists with the North Central Climate Science Center at Colorado State University, the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and several other university and agency partners are working closely with tribal water managers to assess how drought affects the reservation, integrating social, ecological, and hydro-climatological sciences...
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Climate Change is making our environment unpredictable. Increased persistence of drought is causing deaths of plants and animals across our landscapes. However, drought amongst the western United States is not a new thing. Native American populations have been living with drought since time immemorial and practiced culturally prescribed fire practices to foster the landscape for an environment that provides resources for tribal livelihoods and traditional practices (Marks-Block et al. 2019). The United States Geologic Survey and the Yurok Tribe are partnering to study the effects of prescribed burns actively occurring in Yurok Ancestral Territory. Prescribed burns promote a healthy ecosystem through positively...
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Fires are becoming more extensive and severe in the West, and post-fire recovery is a challenge for communities as they adapt to a changing climate. Post-fire management can involve watershedrehabilitation, recovering valuable trees, and replanting to prevent forest loss and damage to watersheds. Land management agencies that make decisions may prioritize goals that differ from those of local populations--especially Native American Tribes, who may focus primarily on recovering non-timber values, such wetlands or species that provide food, fiber, or medicine, on their reservations and on their ancestral homelands. The goal of this research is to inform post-fire management and policy, so it is more responsive to...
map background search result map search result map Developing an Agroforestry Dashboard for the Marshall Islands The Wind River Indian Reservation’s Vulnerability to the Impacts of Drought and the Development of Decision Tools to Support Drought Preparedness Evaluation of Sustainable Water Availability in Drought Prone Watersheds in Southeastern Oklahoma Forest Monitoring and Tree Ring Data to Inform Forest Management on the Navajo Nation Determining Successful Management and Restoration Strategies for Pinyon-Juniper Communities in the Face of Changing Climate and Wildfire Cultural Burning as a Climate Adaptation Strategy Building Tools to Assess Future Climate Impacts on Water Resources of the Canadian River Basin Malo‘o ka lani, wela ka honua (When the sky is dry, the earth is parched): Investigating the Cultural Dimensions of Indigenous Local Knowledge Responses to Changing Climate Conditions Effect of Extreme Tidal Events on Future Sea-Level Rise Scenarios for He‘eia Fish Communities undergoing Ahupua‘a Restoration NW CASC Research Fellowship Program: Training Early-Career Scientists in Developing Decision-Relevant Science Landscape Management Practices on the Pueblo de San Ildefonso Indigenous-Led Climate Adaptation Strategies: Integrating Landscape Condition, Monitoring, and Cultural Fire with the North Fork Mono Tribe Future of Fire in the Southwest: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate Where the Creek Meets the Tide: Effects of Climate Change on Salmon, Homes, and Businesses, and the Squaxin Island Tribe The Importance of Forests for All People: Understanding Forest Recovery Priorities, Management Options, and Policy Needs for Tribes in Post-Fire Landscapes Cycles of Renewal: Returning Good Fire to the Chumash Homelands Improving Water Resilience and Availability Through Culturally Prescribed Fires as a Management Tool on Yurok Tribal Lands The Long View: Developing a 500-year Climate Adaptation Plan with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians An Action Plan for Cultural Resource Climate Adaptation Research and Funding Future of Fire Phase II: Learning by Doing with Cultural Fire Practitioners Landscape Management Practices on the Pueblo de San Ildefonso Where the Creek Meets the Tide: Effects of Climate Change on Salmon, Homes, and Businesses, and the Squaxin Island Tribe The Wind River Indian Reservation’s Vulnerability to the Impacts of Drought and the Development of Decision Tools to Support Drought Preparedness Forest Monitoring and Tree Ring Data to Inform Forest Management on the Navajo Nation Cycles of Renewal: Returning Good Fire to the Chumash Homelands Determining Successful Management and Restoration Strategies for Pinyon-Juniper Communities in the Face of Changing Climate and Wildfire Evaluation of Sustainable Water Availability in Drought Prone Watersheds in Southeastern Oklahoma Developing an Agroforestry Dashboard for the Marshall Islands NW CASC Research Fellowship Program: Training Early-Career Scientists in Developing Decision-Relevant Science Cultural Burning as a Climate Adaptation Strategy Indigenous-Led Climate Adaptation Strategies: Integrating Landscape Condition, Monitoring, and Cultural Fire with the North Fork Mono Tribe Future of Fire Phase II: Learning by Doing with Cultural Fire Practitioners The Long View: Developing a 500-year Climate Adaptation Plan with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Future of Fire in the Southwest: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate Malo‘o ka lani, wela ka honua (When the sky is dry, the earth is parched): Investigating the Cultural Dimensions of Indigenous Local Knowledge Responses to Changing Climate Conditions Effect of Extreme Tidal Events on Future Sea-Level Rise Scenarios for He‘eia Fish Communities undergoing Ahupua‘a Restoration An Action Plan for Cultural Resource Climate Adaptation Research and Funding The Importance of Forests for All People: Understanding Forest Recovery Priorities, Management Options, and Policy Needs for Tribes in Post-Fire Landscapes Building Tools to Assess Future Climate Impacts on Water Resources of the Canadian River Basin