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Joe Hostler

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Promoting Resilience and Adaptive Capacity of Forests and Tribal Communities in Northern California
Within the Yurok Tribe’s territory in northwest California, tribal, public, and private land managers share the overlapping goal of promoting forests that are more resilient to climate-related disturbances through the implementation of forest treatments that are based on traditional tribal knowledge. Managers seek to understand how restoration strategies such as prescribed burning, tree harvesting, and fuel reduction can promote more resilient forests and increase the capacity of forests and human communities to adapt to extreme weather events, drought, fire, and pests and diseases. Very few existing studies of forest vulnerability and resilience have incorporated indigenous or tribal knowledge. In order to promote...
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Improving Water Resilience and Availability Through Culturally Prescribed Fires as a Management Tool on Yurok Tribal Lands
Climate Change is making our environment unpredictable. Increased persistence of drought is causing deaths of plants and animals across our landscapes. However, drought amongst the western United States is not a new thing. Native American populations have been living with drought since time immemorial and practiced culturally prescribed fire practices to foster the landscape for an environment that provides resources for tribal livelihoods and traditional practices (Marks-Block et al. 2019). The United States Geologic Survey and the Yurok Tribe are partnering to study the effects of prescribed burns actively occurring in Yurok Ancestral Territory. Prescribed burns promote a healthy ecosystem through positively...
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Using Yurok Traditional Ecological Knowledge to Set Climate Change Priorities
The Yurok Ancestral Territory, which spans northwestern California from the coastal redwood-spruce rainforest to inland forests and prairies, has provided the Yurok Tribe with an abundance of food and cultural resources for millennia. The Yurok Tribe maintains stewardship responsibility for their Ancestral Lands, which include the Yurok Reservation, and is concerned about the potential impacts of climate change on culturally significant species and the ecosystems that support them. This project had two broad objectives: The first was to meet the needs of the Yurok Tribe in collecting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to identify priority areas and activities for helping the Tribe plan for and respond to climate...
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