Scale in studies of pre-colonial forests: a reply to Armstrong et al

Pre-contact Indigenous fire stewardship: a research framework and application to a Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest

“…Despite this consensus in the social sciences, theory and interpretive frameworks in the biophysical sciences continue to approach the question of the significance of Indigenous peoples' historical influence the region's fire regimes with caution. Indeed, regionally focused paleoecological evidence points toward climate rather than humanity as the dominant driver of fire regimes in the PNW (Whitlock and Knox, 2002;Whitlock, 2008;Oswald et al, 2023). While climate drivers are undoubtedly important, research in New England has used similar results to claim that the dominance of regional climate on fire regimes renders past Indigenous stewardship irrelevant for contemporary restoration and management (Oswald et al, 2020a,b).…”

“…While climate drivers are undoubtedly important, research in New England has used similar results to claim that the dominance of regional climate on fire regimes renders past Indigenous stewardship irrelevant for contemporary restoration and management (Oswald et al, 2020a,b). This argument has recently been extended to the PNW (Oswald et al, 2023), based on work that suggests potential human influences on landscapes were "local" and constrained to lower elevation coastal areas and inland valleys, such as the Willamette Valley, where historical Euro-American documentation of fire use is given more credence (Walsh et al, 2015;Whitlock et al, 2015).…”