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

尽管很明显，自农业诞生以来，在过去一万年左右的时间里，农业和工业化人口已经改变了植物群落，但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影响人们的社会和经济生活。由于缺乏对人类互动在很长时间尺度上的影响的了解，人们很难理解为什么我们的生态系统看起来是这样的，以及某些社会结构和经济为什么以及如何演变。它还阻碍了我们了解我们的生态系统未来将如何应对变化的条件，以及当物种濒临灭绝时我们应该做什么的能力。当一种植物或动物面临濒危或灭绝时，我们往往会因为栖息地丧失或过度开发而迅速采取行动；但有时，特别是对植物而言，这可能是因为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，并通过传播种子来影响其分布，那么该物种的丧失可能是这种人类互动丧失的结果。这个项目探索了当代狩猎采集者如何与植物互动，以更好地了解人类漫长的农业前环境变化历史。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故乡的传统所有者)合作，研究觅食、运动模式和火的使用如何影响野生西红柿(Solanum Arithonflorum)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，我们可能会更好地洞察管理策略，以防止目前的灭绝和衰落。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.