Applying Behavioral Ecology to Help Restore Indigenous Socioenvironmental Systems in the Bear River Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Indigenous land-use decisions influenced plants and animals across North America for thousands of years. These dynamics were disrupted by settler-colonial invasions, leading to declines in ecosystem function and health. Restoring Indigenous socioenvironmental systems and the cultural keystone species they support requires first identifying how human decisions interacted dynamically with local environmental variation. Behavioral ecology informed by Indigenous ecological knowledge provides one framework to help elucidate these patterns. Here we leverage this approach to model the factors that maximized cultural keystone species occurrence, animal diversity, and ecosystem function in the past across the Bear River Basin, and to forecast how these can be restored in the future under anthropogenic climate regimes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52937