RUI: Documenting Ojibwe Land Use Through Tree-Ring Analysis of Culturally Modified Trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

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NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATIONGEOGRAPHY SPATIAL SCIENCES (GSS) PROGRAMABSTRACTThis research project will provide new knowledge regarding the ecological impacts of pre-European settlement land use and the critical importance of these legacies for the management of protected areas. The investigators will advance understanding about the complex interplay between people and the natural environment for understanding past and future biogeographical patterns across multiple scales. Project outcomes will be valuable in identifying the ecological legacies of low-intensity land use and for identifying reference conditions and baseline data for ecological restoration. The project will provide valuable education and training opportunities for undergraduate students enrolled at a primarily undergraduate institution and will foster professional development of early career science educators. The investigators will actively collaborate with Native American tribal resource managers and will conduct outreach activities for sharing outcomes with land-resource management communities and the general public.Enhancing knowledge about the extent of human influence on fire regimes of past millennia has important implications for the understanding and management of fire-adapted vegetation communities in the U.S. and around the world. Bark-peeled pine can provide a compelling context of land use to inform interpretations of an extensive and growing fire history and forest age structure. The investigator will use dendrochronological dating of peel scars on trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to provide the first absolutely dated and spatially precise record of Ojibwe land use in the Great Lakes region. Parametric and non-parametric tests will be performed to compare fire frequency, fire synchrony, and spatial association of areas of high fire frequency with peel-scar occurrence in order to ascertain the association between human and fire activity. Collaboration with archaeologists will provide the cultural context for the tree-ring data and will enable a direct examination of the influence people had on the fire regimes and vegetation communities of this wilderness area. The results of this work will establish a new understanding of the role of people in the pre-European landscape that will help guide future research and management in the Great Lakes Region and throughout temperate forest regions of the world.