Indigenous communities throughout California, USA, are increasingly advocating for and practicing cultural fire stewardship, leading to a host of social, cultural, and ecological benefits. Simultaneously, state agencies are recognizing the importance of controlled burning and cultural fire as a means of reducing the risk of severe wildfire while benefiting fire‐adapted ecosystems. However, much of the current research on the impacts of controlled burning ignores the cultural importance of these ecosystems, and risks further marginalizing Indigenous knowledge systems. Our work adds a critical Indigenous perspective to the study of controlled burning in California's unique coastal grasslands, one of the most biodiverse and endangered ecosystems in the country. In this study, we partnered with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to investigate how the abundance and occurrence of shrubs, cultural plants, and invasive plants differed among three adjacent coastal grasslands with varying fire histories. These three sites are emblematic of the state's diverging approaches to grassland management: fire suppression, fire suppression followed by wildfire, and an exceedingly rare example of a grassland that has been repeatedly burned approximately every 2 years for more than 30 years. We found that Danthonia californica was significantly more abundant on the burned sites, whereas all included shrub species (Baccharis pilularis, Frangula californica, and Rubus ursinus) were significantly more abundant on the site with no recorded fire, results that have important implications for future cultural revitalization efforts and the loss of coastal grasslands to shrub encroachment. In addition to conducting a culturally relevant vegetation survey, we used Sentinel‐2 satellite imagery to compare the relative severities of the two most recent fire events within the study area. Critically, we used interviews with Amah Mutsun tribal members to contextualize the results of our vegetation survey and remote sensing analysis, and to investigate how cultural burning contrasts from typical Western fire management approaches in this region. Our study is a novel example of how interviews, field data, and satellite imagery can be combined to gain a deeper ecological and cultural understanding of fire in California's endangered coastal grasslands.

中文翻译：

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以 Amah Mutsun 的声音为中心，分析具有重要文化意义、防火管理的沿海草原


美国加利福尼亚州的原住民社区越来越多地倡导和实践文化消防管理，带来了一系列社会、文化和生态效益。与此同时，国家机构正在认识到控制燃烧和文化火的重要性，作为降低严重野火风险的一种手段，同时有利于适应火灾的生态系统。然而，目前关于控制燃烧影响的大部分研究都忽视了这些生态系统的文化重要性，并有进一步边缘化土著知识体系的风险。我们的工作为加利福尼亚州独特的沿海草原（美国生物多样性最丰富且濒临灭绝的生态系统之一）的控制燃烧研究添加了关键的土著视角。在这项研究中，我们与 Amah Mutsun 部落乐队合作，调查了具有不同火灾历史的三个相邻沿海草原之间灌木、栽培植物和入侵植物的丰度和出现情况有何不同。这三个地点象征着该州对草原管理的不同做法：先灭火、先灭火后野火，以及一个极其罕见的例子，即在 30 多年的时间里，大约每两年就会反复燃烧一次草原。我们发现，在烧毁地点，丹索尼亚 (Danthonia californica) 的数量明显增多，而在没有火灾记录的地点，所有灌木物种（Baccharis pilularis、Frangula californica 和 Rubus ursinus）的数量明显增多，这些结果对未来的文化具有重要意义。振兴努力和沿海草原因灌木侵占而丧失。 除了进行与文化相关的植被调查外，我们还使用 Sentinel-2 卫星图像来比较研究区域内最近两次火灾事件的相对严重程度。至关重要的是，我们通过对 Amah Mutsun 部落成员的采访，将我们的植被调查和遥感分析的结果结合起来，并调查文化燃烧与该地区典型的西方火灾管理方法有何不同。我们的研究是一个新颖的例子，说明如何将访谈、现场数据和卫星图像结合起来，以更深入地了解加州濒危沿海草原火灾的生态和文化。