The Fremont provide an important case study to examine the resilience of ancient farmers to climatic downturns, because they lived at the far northern margin of intensive maize agriculture in the American West, where the constraints on maize production are made abundantly clear. Using a tree-ring and simulation-based reconstruction of average annual precipitation and maize growing degree days, along with cost-distance to perennial streams, we model spatial variability in Fremont site density in the eastern Great Basin. The results of our analysis have implications for defining the ecological envelope in which farming is a viable strategy across this arid region and can be used to predict where and why maize farming strategies might evolve and eventually collapse as climate changes over time.

弗里蒙特提供了一个重要的案例研究，可以研究古代农民对气候衰退的抵御能力，因为他们生活在美国西部玉米集约农业的最北端，那里对玉米生产的限制非常明显。利用树木年轮和基于模拟的年降水量和玉米生长期天数重建，以及与常年溪流的成本距离，我们模拟了大盆地东部弗里蒙特站点密度的空间变化。我们的分析结果对于定义生态范围具有重要意义，在该范围内农业是该干旱地区的可行策略，并且可用于预测玉米农业策略可能随着气候变化而演变并最终崩溃的地点和原因。