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

虽然很明显，农业和工业化人口在农业起源以来的近一万年左右的时间里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认识，我们很难理解为什么我们的生态系统是现在这个样子，以及为什么某些社会结构和经济是如何演变的。它也阻碍了我们了解生态系统将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，我们通常会很快认为这是因为栖息地丧失或过度开发；然而，有时，特别是对植物来说，这可能是由于失去了一种重要的种子传播者。如果人类已经与野生水果互动了数千年，并通过传播种子影响了其分布，那么该物种的消失可能是人类互动消失的结果。该项目探索当代狩猎采集者如何与植物相互作用，以更好地了解人类前农业时代的环境变化历史。研究小组正在与澳大利亚西部沙漠（Martu和Kulyakartu家园的传统所有者）的土著狩猎采集者合作，以了解觅食，运动模式和火的使用如何塑造了野生西红柿（Solanum diverflorum）的分布和遗传多样性。通过了解数千年来狩猎采集者如何在没有农业的情况下塑造植物分布，我们可以更好地了解当前防止物种灭绝和衰退的管理策略。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

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.