Combining ethnography, genetics, and spatial sciences to investigate the effects of people-plant relationships over time and space

结合民族志、遗传学和空间科学来研究人与植物关系随时间和空间的影响

• 批准号: 1917937
• 负责人: Rebecca Bird
• 金额: $ 43.96万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1917937&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Combining; ethnography; genetics; spatial; sciences

While its clear that agricultural and industrialized populations have changed plant communities over the last ten thousand years or so since the origins of agriculture, we know very little about how hunting and gathering changes the environment, nor how those changed environments feed back to affect people's social and economic lives. This lack of knowledge about effects of human interaction over very long time scales makes it difficult to understand why our ecosystems look the way they do, and why and how certain social structures and economies evolve. It also hampers our ability to know how our ecosystems will respond to changed conditions in the future, and what we should do when species are endangered. When a plant or animal faces endangerment or extinction, we are often quick to assume its because of habitat loss, or overexploitation; yet sometimes, especially with plants, it may be due to the loss of an important seed disperser. If people have interacted with wild fruit for thousands of years, and affected its distribution by dispersing seed, then the loss of that species may be the result of the loss of that human interaction. This project explores how contemporary hunter gatherers interact with plants to better understand the long human pre-agricultural history of environmental change. The research team is working with indigenous hunter-gatherers of Australia's Western Desert (Traditional Owners of Martu and Kulyakartu homelands) to ask how foraging, patterns of movement, and the use of fire has shaped the distribution and genetic diversity of wild tomatoes (Solanum diversiflorum). By understanding how hunter-gatherers have shaped plant distributions over thousands of years in the absence of agriculture, we may gain better insights into management strategies to prevent extinction and decline in the present.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.

很明显，农业和工业化人口在过去一万年左右的时间里改变了植物群落，自从农业起源以来，我们对狩猎和采集如何改变环境知之甚少，也不知道这些变化的环境如何反馈影响人们的社会和经济生活。由于缺乏对人类长期互动影响的了解，我们很难理解为什么我们的生态系统会是这样，为什么某些社会结构和经济会演变，以及它们是如何演变的。它还阻碍了我们了解生态系统如何应对未来变化的条件，以及当物种濒临灭绝时我们应该做些什么。当一种植物或动物面临濒危或灭绝时，我们往往很快就会认为这是因为栖息地的丧失或过度开发;但有时，特别是植物，这可能是由于失去了一个重要的种子传播者。如果人类几千年来一直与野生水果相互作用，并通过传播种子影响其分布，那么该物种的消失可能是人类相互作用丧失的结果。该项目探讨了当代狩猎采集者如何与植物互动，以更好地了解人类农业时代之前环境变化的漫长历史。该研究小组正在与澳大利亚西部沙漠的土著狩猎采集者（Martu和Kulyakartu家园的传统所有者）合作，询问觅食，运动模式和火的使用如何塑造野生番茄（Solanum diversiflorum）的分布和遗传多样性。通过了解狩猎采集者如何在没有农业的情况下塑造数千年来的植物分布，我们可以更好地了解管理策略，以防止灭绝和下降。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。