In this Award from the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows Program) Dr. Robby Q. Cuthrell from the University of California - Berkeley will explore how Traditional Resource and Environmental Management (TREM) practices can be re-implemented to manage lands more sustainably. This award has support from: the Directorate for Biological Sciences, the Directorate for Geosciences and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
The proposed work will: (1) incorporate archaeological biological data into the "Predictive Biosystems Informatics Engine," an integrative database that synthesizes ecological modeling, ecosystems dynamics and human-environmental interactions; (2) conduct integrative historical ecological research on indigenous resource use and TREM practices in California; and (3) bring together multiple stakeholders (public agencies, researchers and descendent communities) to develop, implement, and evaluate the sustainability implications of TREM-based management of California public lands. The work concentrates on the land in the greater San Francisco Bay Area of California.
The aim of studies like that supported in this award is to develop sustainable land management methods.
Dr. Cuthrell will be working with collaborators Prof. Kent Lightfoot of the Department of Anthropology, at the University of California - Berkeley and Dr. Joshua Collins at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and additional collaborators at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology, the State of California's Department of Parks and Recreation and the Amah Mutshun Tribal Band.
This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.
