Using mixed-method analytical historical ecology to map land use and land cover change for ecocultural restoration in the Klamath River Basin (Northern California)

Ecocultural restoration involves the reciprocal repair of ecosystems and revitalization of cultural practices to enhance their mutual resilience to natural and anthropogenic disturbances and climate change stressors. Resilient ecocultural systems are adapted to retain structure and function in the face of disturbances that remain within historical ranges of severity. To assist in ecocultural restoration and management, understanding how a system has historically responded to different types of disturbances is therefore invaluable in understanding how social-ecological resilience can be maintained in the face of future stressors and disturbances. However, records of disturbances and ecocultural responses can be limited for certain landscapes and human communities. In this methods paper, we demonstrate a mixed-method process for integrating oral history, field-based knowledge, archival information, and historical and contemporary aerial images to gain insight into the changes on the Klamath River in Northern California from the 1940s through 2020. We georegistered historical imagery, quantified changes between land cover classes, and contextualized these classifications with qualitative assessments of changes in larger surrounding areas. By synthesizing these data sources with field measurements, mining and other land survey maps, timber management plans, fire and flood histories, and interviews with members of the Karuk Tribe, we were able to reconstruct the land use and land cover change histories at five sites. We noted that recovery of canopy cover from fire and logging practices was faster than for flood, which was faster than recovery from mining, consistent with the relative severity of likely soil disturbance. By combining different sources of information with complementary strengths, we were able to provide managers with site-specific information on recovery from different types of disturbance. Though this approach was labor-intensive, with emerging tools for supervised classification of high-resolution imagery, mixed-method analytical historical ecology could be applied more broadly, supporting ecocultural restoration on a larger scale.