The contribution of Indigenous stewardship to an historical mixed‐severity fire regime in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous land stewardship and mixed-severity fire regimes both promote landscape heterogeneity, and the relationship between them is an emerging area of research. In our study, we reconstructed the historical fire regime of Ne Sextsine, a 5900-ha dry, Douglas fir-dominated forest in the traditional territory of the T'exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) in British Columbia, Canada. Between 1550 and 1982 CE, we found median fire intervals of 18 years at the plot level and 4 years at the study-site level. Ne Sextsine was characterized by an historical mixed-severity fire regime, dominated by frequent, low-severity fires as indicated by fire scars, with infrequent, mixed-severity fires indicated by cohorts. Differentiating low- from mixed-severity plots over time was key to understanding the drivers of the fire regime at Ne Sextsine. Low-severity plots were coincident with areas of highest use by the T'exelc, including winter village sites, summer fishing camps, and travel corridors. The high fire frequency in low-severity plots ceased in the 1870s, following the smallpox epidemic, the forced relocation of Indigenous peoples into small reserves, and the prohibition of Indigenous burning. In contrast, the mixed-severity plots were coincident with areas where forest resources, such as deer or certain berry species, were important. The high fire frequency in the mixed-severity plots continued until the 1920s when industrial-scale grazing and logging began, facilitated by the establishment of a nearby railway. T'exelc oral histories and archeological evidence at Ne Sextsine speak to varied land stewardship, reflected in the spatiotemporal complexity of low- and mixed-severity fire plots. Across Ne Sextsine, 63% of cohorts established and persisted in the absence of fire after colonial impacts beginning in the 1860s, resulting in a dense, homogeneous landscape that no longer supports T'exelc values and is more likely to burn at uncharacteristic high severities. This nuanced understanding of the Indigenous contribution to a mixed-severity fire regime is critical for advancing proactive fire mitigation that is ecoculturally relevant and guided by Indigenous expertise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".