UC Berkeley

The reciprocal relationships between Indigenous people and ecosystems are crucial for both the health and cultural sovereignty of Indigenous communities and the health of many ecosystems that depend on this stewardship for survival. Indigenous communities in California are working to restore these relationships with their homelands and leading efforts to address the causes and impacts of climate change and environmental destruction. In tandem, ecologists are increasingly recognizing the importance of ecological restoration and stewardship. However, the study of Indigenous ecological stewardship – a dynamic cultural, social, and environmental process that is situated in the unique place where it is continually regenerated – is complex and requires tribal involvement and leadership. This is especially true at the intersection of ecology and spatial data science, where the complicated history of spatial technologies requires scientists to co-design culturally relevant methods that respect Indigenous data sovereignty and acknowledge the power of maps to cause harm. In this dissertation, I explore how non-Native ecologists such as myself might transform the ways that we study ecological stewardship and leverage spatial data science through mutual partnership with an Indigenous community: the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.

The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band (hereafter AMTB or the Tribe) is an Indigenous community with homelands along the Central Coast of California. Across five years, Alexii Sigona (Amah Mutsun tribal member and PhD candidate at UC Berkeley) and I have built a research partnership with the Tribe through interviews with tribal members, events with the broader community, and field visits with Amah Mutsun stewards. Our conversations with tribal members through these interactions revealed two exciting research priorities within the community. First, we heard a desire to reconnect with, steward, and gather culturally important plants. Second, many tribal members discussed their goal of bringing more cultural fire back onto the landscape.

My dissertation therefore explores two interrelated objectives: first, to apply spatial data science to the study of Amah Mutsun cultural plants and cultural fire, and second, to examine how a mutual partnership with the AMTB could generate ecological research that was both culturally relevant and affirming. In each of these chapters, I use a different suite of datasets and leading-edge spatial data science methods to explore our co-designed research questions.

Chapter 1 discusses important historical context for this research, introduces the AMTB, and considers how ecological and spatial research intersects with community members’ interests and goals. In Chapter 2, I draw on machine learning models and climate data to predict the habitat of culturally important plants and prioritize potential areas for tribal gathering and stewardship. Chapter 3 takes us to a coastal grassland within Año Nuevo State Park to study the effects of different fire regimes through interdisciplinary methods, including remote sensing, interviews with tribal members, and a vegetation survey. This analysis shows how culturally important plants as well as invasive species are responding to repeated low severity burning, which will guide the Tribe’s cultural fire restoration work. In Chapter 4, I return to the same site to develop and evaluate methods for the remote sensing of fire recovery in grasslands from two types of fire – low severity intentional burning and high severity wildfire – using a temporally dense time series of high resolution Sentinel-2 imagery. These methods can be used to monitor and evaluate the impacts of intentional burning (both cultural fire and prescribed fire) in grasslands globally. In Chapter 5, I conclude with my major findings as well as broader reflections on my research partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and what lessons my experience might hold for other non-Native scientists.

Reparative partnerships between environmental scientists and Indigenous communities are essential due both to past harms perpetuated by environmental science and the urgency of climate change. If conducted with care, research that centers Indigenous communities and stewardship practices stands to significantly strengthen global environmental efforts and generate greater ecocultural benefits for Indigenous communities.