From Water to Life: Impact of Climate Warming on Potential Wetland and First Foods Habitat in Traditional Use Areas of The Klamath Tribes

 
First foods are integral components of the culture, spirituality, medicine, well-being, and health of the Klamath people. Throughout the Klamath Basin, climate change has substantially impacted the seasonality, abundance, and quality of first foods and other culturally important resources. These impacts compound with long-term challenges to food security and food sovereignty, particularly for those living in areas currently considered “food deserts.” Through co-production and actionable science, researchers supported by this Northwest CASC project will create a framework to inform Indigenous-led implementation of science into management and conservation plans to protect the habitats that provide these resources against future climate and land use change.
 
Public Summary
 
In a region currently classified as a “food desert”, dry to wet meadows and wetlands have supported the Klamath Tribes for millennia. These habitats have high conservation and restoration value to support biodiversity and critical ecosystem functions, like filtering and regulating water supply, acting as a major migratory flyway, as well as providing first foods. These first foods are integral components of the culture, spirituality, medicine, well-being, and health of the Klamath people. However, climate warming and land use changes that supported timber and agriculture industries for more than a century have disrupted hydrological and fire regimes and degraded crucial land and water habitats.
 
This work will assess meadow and wetland potential over 15 million acres in southcentral Oregon and northern California to provide decision support tools fundamental to climate smart conservation, restoration, and management of at-risk habitats and their functions. By combining the flexibility and power of remote-sensing tools with local and Indigenous knowledge, this project seeks to provide the Klamath Tribes with spatially explicit inventories of areas likely to support first foods as the climate continues to warm. The resulting climate vulnerability assessment will facilitate evaluation of how the region’s meadows and wetlands may respond to future climate and droughts. Explicit mapping of potential first foods habitat will be conducted only at the discretion of and in close collaboration with the Klamath Tribes.
 
A main goal of this project is to provide an updatable framework and usable decision support tools to help guide management for meadow, wetland, and first foods habitat in a changing climate. Deliverables will include maps of potential meadow and wetland habitat and climate vulnerability, as well as training on the use of tools and workflow components and documentation of the workflow, including tool components, to support continued updating and model improvement by the Klamath Tribes. This framework will inform Indigenous-led implementation of science into management actions and has the potential to be used by other tribes with similar goals.