Unearthing fire's legacy: ASU professor receives NSF grant to study fire’s role in ecosystem preservation

Fire was considered one of the most pivotal discoveries for human evolution, regarded by Darwin as “probably the greatest ever made by man, except language.” 

Fire has transformed ecosystems and influenced humans' vegetation and socio-cultural environments. Fire has also been commonly used in cultural practices by different communities.

How will the long-term cultural burning practiced by Indigenous communities affect ecological zones worldwide? How have archaeological fire patterns shaped high-elevation Pacific-Northwest landscapes and affected long-term ecosystem stability?

These questions are at the core of the interdisciplinary archaeology research that Sean Bergin is working on toward ecology preservation efforts. Bergin is an assistant professor at the School of Complex Adaptive Systems, an academic unit of the ASU College of Global Futures.

In August, Bergin, along with his colleagues Grant Snitker from the Center for Applied Fire and Ecosystem Science at the New Mexico Consortium, Megan Walsh, professor of the department of geography at Central Washington University, and Michelle Steen Adams, research associate professor at Washington State University, were awarded this year’s National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their research project, titled “Long-Term Human Fire Management and Environmental Change in High-Elevation Social-Ecological Systems.”

“Through this research, we aim to advance our understanding of our current socio-ecological systems by developing an understanding of past socio-ecological systems,” Bergin said.

The region being studied is the subalpine ecosystems of Washington’s Central Cascade Range, which has a long history of cultural burning practices associated with maintaining culturally important plant species like huckleberry.

The interdisciplinary research incorporates archaeological survey data, paleoecological samples, and computational models of the use of land and charcoal distribution. The team also collaborated with federal agencies and Indigenous community partners from the Yakama Nation tribe, Bergin said.  

The research initiative to look into the social and ecological history of the Central Cascades started in 2021. The team has been conducting fieldwork in Washington, across the Wenatchee National Forest of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. Through the search, they discovered multiple artifacts, including pre-contact chipped stone flakes, a biface and basalt hammer stone, and the surface's extracted soil core.

“These findings indicated that a pre-contact, human presence is observable on the surface in the subalpine zones of the Central Cascades,” Bergin said. “These initial field seasons gave us the confidence that surface surveys could identify archaeological materials present on the surface will be sufficient to help answer questions regarding trends in land use and occupation in high-elevation areas of the Central Cascades.”

The awarded NSF grant enables Bergin’s team to further the research in evaluating the socio-ecological dynamics in Washington’s Central Cascades.

“This NSF grant will allow us to build upon our previous small-scale pilot studies to understand past human land use in subalpine ecosystems of Washington’s Central Cascade Range,” Bergin said. “Although not unheard of, the integration of these distinct lines of evidence and experience is uncommon in studies of the past; we hope that the success of this project will encourage us to use a framework that incorporates this.”

The findings will advance the understanding of social-environmental change and stability in high-elevation ecosystems and contribute to preserving these unique landscapes by mitigating future wildfire risks and reducing ecosystem loss.