Fire and Humans in Resilient Ecosystems in the American Southwest

Twenty-first century landscape fires transform ecosystems, damage heritage resources, and threaten human communities across the globe. Although policymakers tend to consider contemporary fire problems a unique feature of an industrialized and warming world, human communities have lived in fire-prone settings for millennia. Deep, place-based knowledge of fire impacts on ecosystems undoubtedly facilitated the sustainability of these human communities. Active research in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico integrates ethnographic, archaeological, paleoclimate, paleoecological, and simulation data to reconstruct the dynamic histories of ecological and human communities, their fire regimes, and the vulnerability of these communities to climate changes. Presenters in this symposium articulate the research strategies and results of interdisciplinary investigations that underpin collaborative efforts to understand the long-term relationships between dense human settlements, land-use, climate change, and landscape fire dynamics to build a science and traditional knowledge-based framework for improved management of fire-prone Southwestern forests.