Pacific Northwest’s ‘forest gardens’ were deliberately planted by Indigenous people

Andrew Curry wrote:For decades, First Nations people in British Columbia knew their ancestral homes—villages forcibly emptied in the late 1800s—were great places to forage for traditional foods like hazelnuts, crabapples, cranberries, and hawthorn. A new study reveals that isolated patches of fruit trees and berry bushes in the region’s hemlock and cedar forests were deliberately planted by Indigenous peoples in and around their settlements more than 150 years ago. It’s one of the first times such “forest gardens” have been identified outside the tropics, and it shows that people were capable of changing forests in long-lasting, productive ways.

Full Article Pacific Northwest’s ‘forest gardens’ were deliberately planted by Indigenous people here at ScienceMag.

Chelsey Geralda Armstrong et.al. wrote:Human land-use legacies have long-term effects on plant community composition and ecosystem function. While ancient and historical land use is known to affect biodiversity patterns, it is unknown whether such legacies affect other plant community properties such as the diversity of functional traits. Functional traits are a critical tool for understanding ecological communities because they give insights into community assembly processes as well as potential species interactions and other ecosystem functions. Here, we present the first systematic study evaluating how plant functional trait distributions and functional diversity are affected by ancient and historical Indigenous forest management in the Pacific Northwest. We compare forest garden ecosystems - managed perennial fruit and nut communities associated exclusively with archaeological village sites - with surrounding periphery conifer forests. We find that forest gardens have substantially greater plant and functional trait diversity than periphery forests even more than 150 years after management ceased. Forests managed by Indigenous peoples in the past now provide diverse resources and habitat for animals and other pollinators and are more rich than naturally forested ecosystems. Although ecological studies rarely incorporate Indigenous land-use legacies, the positive effects of Indigenous land use on contemporary functional and taxonomic diversity that we observe provide some of the strongest evidence yet that Indigenous management practices are tied to ecosystem health and resilience.

Research Paper released into the Creative Commons Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity here at Ecology and Society.

I would add that the bottom layer of any healthy northwest forest is a salmon bearing stream. Even the conifers host dozens of edible and medicinal plants and abundant mushrooms as well.

Yeah, that was the main subsistence strategy for people all up & down the west coast. In some tribes further south, it was described as a family owned a specific patch or patches of forest for them to gather from & it was their responsibility to take care of it.

There are a lot of mentions in old records showing that all tribes sort of did similar things-- tribes in the east relocated plants to make large patches of favored foods nearby, so they didn't have to waste too much time looking. I think most of those got destroyed over time because, in the east, most of the villages became America's first towns. The whites didn't understand for a while how to actually settle a new village-- what sorts of signs & issues to consider & look out for, so resettling Native villages became the earliest method for success. Most of those earliest towns grew into major US cities, ergo a lot of the immediately surrounding land has been swallowed.