Daniel Sarna-Wojcicki’s research while affiliated with University of California, Berkeley and other places

Moving from an era of dam building to dam removal brings additional perspectives to indigenous water governance and hydrosocial relations in the Klamath River Basin (US). This collaborative research initiative with the Karuk Tribe builds greater understanding of the sociocultural impacts of Klamath dam removal and river restoration through Karuk knowledge. Addressing a knowledge gap around the social dimensions of dam removal, we held focus groups and interviews with Karuk cultural practitioners, tribal leaders, and tribal youth in the six-month period leading up to demolition. Extending beyond a focus on infrastructure removal or single-species restoration, we consider how Indigenous environmental relations and cosmologies are embedded in dam removal and river restoration. Specifically, Karuk knowledge shifts the significance of dam removal by elucidating deeply interconnected ecological, cultural, and ceremonial relations that are co-constituted with the Klamath watershed, thereby recasting dam removal as a holistic eco-cultural revitalization initiative. This reconfigures dam removal goals to include improving community health and well-being, enhancing spiritual elements of river restoration, responding to colonial legacies, and engaging tribal youth. In the Klamath case, restorative justice becomes possible through Karuk participation in river restoration to facilitate the revitalization of reciprocal relations held between Karuk people and the Klamath River—including Karuk eco-cultural and ceremonial practices for restoring balance in the world.

Access to healthy and appealing food is essential for individuals to be able to live a healthy and quality life. For decades, food security has been a priority issue for public health professionals. Food sovereignty expands upon the concept of food insecurity (i.e., having access to nutritious and culturally relevant food) by incorporating people’s rights to define their own food system. The expanded focus of food sovereignty on food systems prioritizes public health professionals’ role in supporting environmental- and systems-level initiatives and evaluating their implications for health, economics, and the natural environment. Food sovereignty is of particular importance for Indigenous peoples (i.e., American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities). Colonization had demonstrable consequences, with many Indigenous communities being forcibly relocated from traditional lands, alongside the destruction of traditional food sources. Indigenous food sovereignty aligns with the sovereign nation status that American Indian tribes and Alaska Native communities have with the United States. Furthermore, the worldviews that incorporate Indigenous communities’ relational responsibilities to care for their food systems, according to their traditional practices and beliefs (Coté, 2016; Morrison, 2011), uniquely positions Indigenous peoples to lead food sovereignty initiatives. In this article, we explore what is currently known regarding food sovereignty and health. We then discuss opportunities to expand the evidence on Indigenous food sovereignty’s relationships with (1) health and well being, (2) economics, (3) the natural environment, and (4) programming facilitators and barriers.

Indigenous communities in the United States experience some of the highest rates of food insecurity and diet-related diseases despite an abundance of food assistance programs and other public health interventions. New approaches that center Indigenous perspectives and solutions are emerging and urgently needed to better understand and address these challenges. This Practice Note shares lessons learned from ongoing collaboration between the Karuk Tribe and University of California, Berkeley researchers and other partners to assess and enhance food sovereignty among Tribes and Tribal communities in the Klamath River Basin. Through two participatory research and extension projects, we demonstrate the importance of centering Indigenous knowledge to strengthen research findings and identify more culturally appropriate solutions to community identified food access, health, and ecosystem challenges. Key findings suggest that approaches to food sovereignty and community health must emanate from the community, be approached holistically, reflect community values and priorities, and center Indigenous land stewardship.

Indigenous People in the Klamath River Basin have cared for and utilized ecosystems and component resources since time immemorial, proactively conserving species through continuous use and stewardship. Though many culturally significant plants are still tended and used by Indigenous people, many species are also experiencing prolonged stress from colonial forest management practices and environmental change. By integrating western and Indigenous ways of knowing, as part of a participatory and collaborative research and extension project, we present an approach to informing the conservation of four culturally significant plants (tanoak, evergreen huckleberry, beargrass, and iris) and understanding the influence of bioclimatic factors and stress on Indigenous people’s relationships with plants and the broader forest ecosystem. Mixed methods and ways of knowing generate a detailed assessment of each case study species that presence only species distribution models cannot supply alone. In this study we use MAXENT to model species distributions of our four study species and the flexible coding method in NVivo for qualitative interview and focus group data. Using species distribution models and 127 interviews and focus groups with cultural practitioners, we found significant shifts in huckleberry harvesting times, beargrass and iris cultural use quality, and tanoak acorn availability that must be addressed for the long-term vitality of these species and interconnected cultures and people. Tribes have generations of knowledge, experience, and connection to land that can help inform how to combat stressors and enhance productivity of forest foods and fibers and the health of forest ecosystems.

After a century of fire suppression and accumulating fuel loads in North American forests, prescribed burns are increasingly used to prevent conditions leading to catastrophic megafire. There is widespread evidence that prescribed fire was used by Indigenous communities to manage natural and cultural resources for thousands of years. Wildlife habitat is an example of an ecological response that was actively managed with prescribed burns by Indigenous American peoples and is an important factor in western US forest management planning, restoration and climate resilience efforts. We analysed the effects of modern prescribed burns informed by traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) on the predicted change in elk winter habitat in Karuk aboriginal territory in Northern California between 2013 and 2018 using species distribution and simultaneous autoregressive modelling techniques. Burn types most closely resembling Karuk traditional practices, specifically those incorporating multiple‐year broadcast burns, had significant positive effects on elk winter habitat suitability. Conversely, concentrated burns focused solely on reducing fuel loads had significant negative effects on elk winter habitat suitability. However, areas where these fuel‐reduction burns were combined with multiple years of broadcast burns featured the highest increases in habitat. Synthesis and applications. Our results suggest that transitioning to prescribed burns that more closely follow Karuk traditional ecological knowledge will promote elk habitat in the region. This would be best achieved through continuing to work closely with Indigenous representatives to plan and implement cultural fire prescriptions on a landscape scale, a trend we posit would benefit environmental management efforts across the globe.

Racism and colonialism within restoration science continue to perpetuate exclusionary and oppressive paradigms in ecosystem restoration and in wider societal contexts, from setting scientific agendas to translating findings into policy. These paradigms impair progress and cause harm by (1) tokenizing epistemic diversity, (2) perpetuating injustice in frontline communities by ignoring power dynamics and other local contexts, and (3) rejecting "unconventional" methods for connecting knowledge to action. To challenge exclusion, biological scientists must listen to path-making conversations in Native American and Indigenous studies on grounded normativity, an ethical framework informed by place-based practices that make respectful, nonexploitative coexistence between human and nonhuman communities possible. Rather than treat Western science as the objective arbiter of truth, Indigenous and feminist science approaches can draw on multiple sciences to design restoration interventions and unsettle power dynamics and historical legacies in the biological sciences. We put these approaches into practice and discuss the methodologies and outcomes of two restoration projects, one on the Duwamish River and one on the Klamath River. We use the lessons learned to discuss how scientists in all biological fields can prevent harmful inequities in restoration work while building capacity in and supporting crucial work by frontline communities.

Recent developments to spatial-capture recapture models have allowed their use on species whose members are not uniquely identifiable from photographs by including individual identity as a latent, unobserved variable in the model. These ‘unmarked’ spatial capture recapture (uSCR) models have also been extended to presence-absence data and modified to allow categorical environmental covariates on density, but a uSCR model, which allows fitting continuous environmental covariates to density, has yet to be formulated. In this paper, we fill this gap and present an extension to the uSCR modeling framework by modeling animal density on a discrete state space as a function of continuous environmental covariates and investigate a form of Bayesian variable selection to improve inference. We used an elk population in their winter range within Karuk Indigenous Territory in Northern California as a case study and found a positive credible effect of increasing forb/grass cover on elk density and a negative credible effect of increasing tree cover on elk density. We posit that our extensions to uSCR modeling increase its utility in a wide range of ecological and management applications in which spatial counts of wildlife can be derived and environmental heterogeneity acts as a control on animal density.

In the Klamath River Basin (KRB) of northern California and southern Oregon, climate-related changes, such as more intense droughts, varied and concentrated precipitation, earlier spring and later fall conditions, extreme temperatures, and decreased snowpack have contributed to increasingly unpredictable plant reproduction and harvest cycles. In this study, we explore contemporary relationships between plants and Indigenous People in the KRB, identifying benefits of cultural ecosystem services (CES) derived from Indigenous stewarding and gathering of culturally significant plants, and discuss how these services may change based on climate change observations and experiences. This study contributes to the conceptualization of Indigenous Cultural Ecosystem Services (ICES), providing a framework for the incorporation of Indigenous concepts, approaches, and perspectives into assessments of ecosystem services (ES) and, particularly, CES. It highlights the value of Indigenous perspectives and observations of climate change effects on plant reproduction and productivity, as well as their contribution to cultural ecosystem resilience and adaptation under changing climate conditions. We propose that incorporating Indigenous concepts and approaches to assessing CES and ES could lead to more holistic management decisions and better-informed climate adaptation initiatives with greater ES for all.