Colonial management drives ecological change following the exclusion of Indigenous stewardship in a Stoney Iyethka montane grassland, Canadian Rocky Mountains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract For millennia, Indigenous Peoples and their ecological stewardship have kept culturally important landscapes open, diverse and productive. Under colonization which suppresses stewardship activities, landscape vegetation patterns shift and areas previously stewarded by Indigenous Peoples are now undergoing successional change. As a case study, we document ecological change on the homelands of the Stoney Iyethka Nations in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where landscapes have changed dramatically over the past century of colonial management. On the Stoney Iyethka traditional montane Egnuck Wida grasslands, we analysed vegetation change on both the landscape and plot level. Using oblique photographs taken in 1924 paired with 2021 satellite imagery, we compared past and present landscape vegetation cover and assessed drivers of succession. We also examined differences in vegetation class cover and plant community structure between surveys conducted in 1981, 1995 and 2020. Nearly half (47%) of the landscape surveyed showed seral progression in vegetation class, which was not explained by topography, geology or climate warming. Grassland area decreased four‐fold between 1924 and 2021. Grassland retention was strongly related to management zoning, with greater losses in the crown‐managed ecological reserve than on lands that remain under Stoney Iyethka stewardship. Vegetation plots surveyed reveal changes to plant community composition and shifts in dominant vegetation class. In plots previously composed primarily of forbs and graminoids, shrubs have become the dominant groundcover. Declines in historic vegetation include a loss of culturally important food, medicine and ceremonial plants to the Stoney Iyethka Nations. The most likely explanation for these results is the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and their stewardship from the landscape. We demonstrate that the past century of colonial environmental management has altered ecological processes maintained on this landscape for millennia by Indigenous Peoples. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".