Brian Codding
University of Utah, UT·Ecology & Evolution
For thousands of years, Indigenous practices shaped where plants and animals lived around the world. Biodiversity and ecosystem health are often higher where these Indigenous socio-environmental systems (SES), the linked relationships between people and their environment, still persist.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
Indigenous socio-environmental systems
socio-ecological systems
ecological restoration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Quantify long-term Indigenous socio-environmental dynamics in the Bear River Basin by combining traditional knowledge, archaeology, paleoecology, historical ecology and community ecology.
- Test whether gradual or random (stochastic) processes drive the stability, resilience and tipping points of these human-environment systems, using statistical and process-based models with uncertainty estimates.
- Evaluate how well alternative restoration scenarios on Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation land may work under future climate regimes, using forecasting models.
- Develop a general convergence framework for Restoring Indigenous Socio-Environmental Systems (RISES) through shared leadership with Indigenous communities and sharing of results with land managers.
More about the research
In North America and elsewhere, colonial invasion, intensive agriculture and industry disrupted these systems. This project asks how such systems worked over the long term, what drove them to change, and how they can be restored.
Why it matters
Ecosystem restoration usually leaves out Indigenous communities, to the detriment of both people and landscapes. This work could give Tribes and land managers models that forecast which restoration approaches are likely to succeed under future climate. It starts with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation's restoration in the Bear River Basin and offers a framework other communities could use.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andrew Kliskey
University of Idaho, ID·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize and evaluate energy-water system configurations in Idaho's Snake River Basin, including storage, efficiency, conservation and governance, across a range of resilience strategies.
Marya Smith
George Washington University, DC·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify and analyze changes in hydroclimatological conditions — river flow, ice and climate variables — in the Kuskokwim basin of Alaska and the Selenge basin of Mongolia that affect human activities and ecosystem services.
Laura Lopez-Hoffman
University of Arizona, AZ·Ecology & Evolution
Identify the social and ecological conditions that lead to telecoupled governance, in which management in one place responds to effects in distant places, for migratory birds and bats crossing international borders.
The school
University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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