DISES: Cultural resilience and shifting baselines of the North American fur trade

Today’s international markets connect supply and demand for, animal products around the globe. The increasing interdependence of societies on global movement of living things has impacted biodiversity, including extinctions and invasions. This impacts ecosystem services that people rely on.

Economic harvest practices were established during the 16th-19th centuries by the North American fur trade. They can provide an understanding of today’s complex coupled human-ecological systems. European demand for mammal pelts altered life for indigenous North Americans and shifted thousands of years of traditional harvest practices.

However, we know very little about the ecological effects of this massive harvest that shaped the structure and function of the North American ecosystems. This project integrates archaeological, historical, and modern data and specimens to study populations of beaver, muskrat, and mink over the past several thousand years. It will use that interdisciplinary data to understand the consequences of mass harvesting, ecosystem change, and the effects of different cultural practices on furbearers.

The project’s broader impacts include diversifying participation of individuals that contribute in terms of research, management and policy.

The study employs diverse methods and perspectives. The research tools include ancient DNA sequencing, stable isotope analysis, zooarchaeology, morphometrics, and wildlife ecology. By comparing cultures and ecosystems in parallel from Oregon to Maine, the study will assess how different cultural practices have shaped species and ecological outcomes.

It will also investigate how those environmental changes shape future decisions, practices, and social dynamics, while characterizing coupled socio-ecological landscapes through time. This will provide a powerful multidimensional model that will facilitate conservation of biodiversity and traditional livelihoods. This model will explore how and why species recover, and what the signatures of recovery look like across different datasets that are not typically aligned and jointly analyzed.

This long-term dataset of resilience and recovery will provide valuable and applicable lessons about local furbearer management and the IUCN Green List. This project is jointly funded by the Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems (DISES) program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.