Monkton Road is an approximately 10-mile stretch of road in Northwest Vermont, about 20 miles south of Burlington. For decades, it was a lightly traveled, local road, and traffic was not much of a concern for people or wildlife. In fact, Monkton Road was actually a rural dirt road for over a century until increased development prompted the need to pave the road. As Vermont's population grew, so did the number of vehicles on this road, also in part because GPS devices offered the route as a shortcut to Burlington. Soon, the rate of annual average daily traffic on the road reached between 2,000 and 3,000 vehicles, which became a threat to local amphibian populations who must cross this road every spring in order to breed.

Or, as Chris Slesar, environmental resources coordinator at the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans), put it more empathetically, 2,000–3,000 vehicles a day “is not a terribly busy road by US standards. However, it is unquestionably and significantly busy if your lifecycle requires you to crawl slowly across the road on your belly in the dark, sans reflective apparel, at least twice a year.” That is, this relatively short section of Monkton Road, just under a mile long, bisects two important pieces of amphibian habitat. Monkton Road runs directly between upland and wetland habitats, which means amphibians must cross this road to breed during their spring migration.

For many years, a greater number of amphibians were being reproduced than were being killed on this stretch of road. More recently, however, increased traffic was claiming the lives of about 50 percent of amphibians who tried to cross this section of the road during their spring migration. Groups of concerned citizens and local researchers would gather at night to help move these amphibians across the road, attempting “nocturnal bucket-brigade rescues for the amphibians,” which was limited in its success and also put people at risk. In 2005, it became clear that this grassroots method, in which citizens manually carried these amphibians across the road, was not sustainable in the long term.

The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM) is located in the northwestern part of the Hawaiian Archipelago and is one of the world's largest marine protected areas. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) consist of a group of small, remote islands and atolls northwest of the Kauai and Niihau islands and include one of the most pristine coral reef ecosystems in the world. This ecosystem supports a large number of apex predators and other endemic species and is a critical habitat for many threatened and endangered species. In June 2006, almost 140,000 square miles of this marine environment were designated as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands MNM; one year later, the area was renamed Papahānaumokuākea.

The PMNM also encompasses the Midway Atoll, which has been in the media in recent years due to the vast quantities of marine plastic debris that litter its shores and threaten the Laysan Albatross that nests in the NWHI region (Figure 9.1). In addition to the more well-known Laysan Albatross, however, the national monument is also a transit corridor that is used by approximately 14 million seabirds of different species for breeding, foraging, and stopping over during migrations. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands also provide an important stopover habitat for shorebirds as they migrate through the central Pacific and are home to the Laysan Finch, Nihoa Finch, and Nihoa Millerbird, which are all endangered and found only on “one or a few islands, putting their populations at risk from predators, storms, and other catastrophic events.” Finally, “at least six species of terrestrial plants found only in the region are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, some so rare that because of the difficulty of surveying these remote islands, they have not been documented for many years.”

The Creation of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM)

At the time that PMNM was created in 2006, it already “covered 140,000 square miles of ocean around the uninhabited northwestern islands of Hawaii.” Then, in 2016, former president Barack Obama expanded the boundaries of the national monument, which “more than quadrupled Papahānaumokuākea's size, to 582,578 square miles, an area larger than all the national parks combined.”

Thus far, we have focused largely on how roads and interstate systems can bisect habitats in ways that can prevent species from migrating or making their way to breeding sites; moreover, when roadways bisect habitats, species run the risk of losing their biodiversity through inbreeding. Within the field of road ecology, however, there has been less focus on the ways that railroads and railway systems can similarly disrupt ecosystems as a result of train tracks and tunnel systems being constructed in vulnerable habitats. Railway systems perhaps receive less attention because they are less consistently traveled than roads and highways.

Wildlife Implications of Railways Versus Roadways

At the same time, it is also inaccurate to make an easy comparison between cars and trains, as they and their environmental implications are far from the same, and each has different impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity. While train traffic may be less frequent than car traffic, trains travel much faster than cars. Additionally, interstates and railways are also structurally and physically different, “especially in the case of electrified railways, where overhead lines along the rail tracks can represent an additional source of impacts. All these differences are likely to affect wildlife responses to roads and railways.” And while trains are often viewed as a more climate-friendly and sustainable mode of transportation compared to vehicles, they too contribute to pollution, wildlife deaths, and habitat fragmentation. That said, statistically, railways are significantly safer than roadways, at least for people and cargo.

As described by Borda-de-Água et al., a 2013 report by the European Railway Agency notes that the “fatality risk in the period 2008–2010 measured as the number of fatalities per billion passenger-km is 0.156 to railway passengers and 4.450 for car occupants. In fact, following the same report, transport safety is only surpassed by the airline industry with 0.101 fatalities per billion passenger-km.” Railways are also more environmentally friendly than roads because a diesel-powered train is more energy efficient than its equivalent number of cars, and an electric-powered train is not a direct source of greenhouse gas emissions. Railways generally also occupy less land than roads and interstates.

To suggest that wildlife corridors are a necessary component of restoring lost habitat connectivity requires an understanding of some of the concepts that shaped the conceptualization and implementation of wildlife corridors in the first place. To begin, as defined by the research group Conservation Corridor, a corridor is “a habitat whose main function is to connect isolated patches of habitat that would otherwise be inaccessible.” Next, understanding the value of wildlife corridors also requires knowledge of the concept of connectivity or the ease with which species are able to move between different appropriate habitats.

Understanding Connectivity

As mentioned in the Introduction, ecological connectivity refers to “the unimpeded movement of species and the flow of natural processes that sustain life on Earth.” As habitats become increasingly fragmented, and as biodiversity continues to be threatened by the processes of infrastructure development, climate change, and other forces driving the Anthropocene, it becomes even more critical to protect connectivity (Figure 2.1). As Hilty et al. note in their 2020 IUCN report, Guidelines for Conserving Connectivity through Ecological Networks and Corridors: “Science overwhelmingly shows that inter-connected protected areas and other areas for biological diversity conservation are much more effective than disconnected areas in human-dominated systems, especially in the face of climate change.” Moreover, to achieve this, the 2020 IUCN report recommends establishing an ecological network for conservation to help establish ecological corridors and achieve connectivity. The IUCN defines an ecological network for conservation as “a system of core habitats […] connected by ecological corridors, which is established, restored as needed and maintained to conserve biological diversity in systems that have been fragmented.” This network, or system of core habitats, would ideally be comprised of protected areas, other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), and other intact natural areas. Together, these areas would constitute an ecological corridor; in other words, functioning in the positive, an ecological network would be connected with ecological corridors. An ecological corridor “is a clearly defined geographical space that is governed and managed over the long term to maintain or restore effective ecological connectivity.” While it is possible to achieve connectivity conservation goals without the presence of a network per se, ecological networks for conservation “are more effective in achieving biodiversity conservation objectives than a disconnected collection of individual protected areas and OECMs because they connect populations, maintain ecosystem functioning and are more resilient to climate change.”

Indigenous people in the Americas disproportionately depend on wild meat. Many approaches have been applied to assess the impact of hunting on wildlife populations by determining whether or not it can be defined as “sustainable.” Proper understanding of sustainability requires specification of what is being sustained, the spatial extent under consideration, the duration over which the resource is being sustained, and how the impact of a particular use compares with realistic forms of alternative uses. The sustainability of hunting is species specific with harvest-sensitive species often succumbing to depletion, while others persist indefinitely. Prey profiles of Amazonian hunters rapidly shift from low-fecundity and harvest-sensitive to high-fecundity and harvest-insensitive species as local human population density increases. This is a consequence of the life history of each hunted species, which dictates age at first birth, fecundity, and survivorship, and its “catchability,” which is a measure of the effectiveness of hunting effort. Here we review density-dependent population growth in wildlife and the implementation of harvest models typical to human central-place foragers to project wildlife populations in space and time rather than a binary assessment of whether hunting is “sustainable.”

What do Indigenous peoples have to tell us about the cultural landscapes they have created by their Indigenous knowledge. Human land-use changes impact physical and biological processes at different scales, creating a legacy of cultural footprints on the landscape. Indigenous populations have occupied the Americas for at least the last 30,000 years. They have adapted to an environment that had previously not been occupied by humans. Indigenous populations were seen by European colonizers in the 1400s as inferior people with no written language, primarily stone tools, and a different spiritual system and were therefore seen as having no sophisticated culture compared with the colonists’ European culture. Further European epidemic diseases caused major decreases in Indigenous populations and major destruction of their culture. This cultural destruction has continued into the twenty-first century. Indigenous peoples, however, had their own well-developed cultures that had created a large number of domesticated plants and had developed complex agricultural systems that supported large populations and increasingly sophisticated land-use and culture. This was all cut short by the arrival of European colonizers who could not recognize a culture different from their own. Today, we have started to understand the similarities and differences between the culture of science and that of Indigenous knowledge, which resulted from the development of both in isolation of the other. This book’s objective is to consider how Indigenous populations have lived and managed the American landscape. They have left a footprint that is a combination of their empirical knowledge and their spiritual culture.

Indigenous students live between two worldviews of how the natural world works – the world of traditional knowledge and the world of science. The common denominator is the land. In this chapter, I outline some of the challenges in matching best pedagogy within the cultures of schools, science, traditional Indigenous knowledge, and teaching on the land. How can schools build relationships with local Indigenous knowledge keepers to develop a culturally responsive science curriculum? How can we support knowledge keepers and teachers to provide land-based science lessons in the context of a typical school? How do we prepare teachers in active learning and inquiry methods to match traditional ways of teaching? And how do we do this all while on the land?

Although many might situate the most important traditional Indigenous knowledge in the realm of perceptive ecological awareness, there is a compelling argument to be made that there was a more critical, underlying realm of knowledge. As important as traditional ecological knowledge and effective, naturally sustained technologies were, the sophisticated knowledge involving kinship can legitimately be regarded as the critical factor that made possible the rich and complex history of at least 14,000 years of Indigenous life in the Americas. In settings like the Great Basin or boreal forest, extensive webs of kin relationships were essential in ensuring human presence throughout the millennia. Here, I sketch a profile of what can be learned from Dene (Athapaskan) kinship, so responsive in managing not just Subarctic but a wide range of environments in western North America. A “thought model” derived from Dene kin principles is helpful in grasping the unusual circumstances that founding Indigenous populations encountered once they had departed Pleistocene Beringia for a Western hemisphere entirely without human inhabitants: an epic human journey. Such thought models can, with judicious use, intersect with rapidly unfolding genetic and archaeological findings and thereby be applied to further our understanding of the dawn of Indigenous presence in the Americas.

The existing literature confirms that Native American tribes historically enhanced culturally preferred plant communities through periodic burning in what is today Yosemite National Park; in turn, beginning with nineteenth-century park development, fire suppression contributed to conifer and shrub encroachment on anthropogenic meadows and other culturally significant habitats. However, we contend that traditional burning practices cannot be understood without considering the pronounced cultural role of wetland habitats and species, and the intersection between burning practices and wetland plant communities among tribes of the Sierra Nevada Range. Our ethnographic investigations revealed that a majority of culturally important plants identified by tribal members in Yosemite Valley were wetland species. Interviewees also recall that traditional burning included wetlands and wetland margins – with the scale, timing, and location of burning responding to seasonal water-table fluctuations in those environments. Thus, US National Park Service (NPS) manipulation of valley hydrology eroded culturally significant plant communities over time, compounding the effects of fire suppression, together facilitating conifer encroachment. We present evidence of historical practices and trends based on a comprehensive review of available historical literature and ethnographic accounts, as well as the guidance of twentieth- and twenty-first-century tribal elders and the written record of NPS land management.

Landscapes are important frames for understanding and bridging environmental perspectives, including between Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems. Landscapes are both “natural” and “cultural,” for, as Indigenous societies attest, all landscapes manifest the coevolutionary interplay of human and nonhuman forces.  We apply three integrated ecological lenses to analyze this interplay: historical ecology, ethno-ecology, and political ecology. Our case study is the Alsek-Dry Bay region of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada, at the intersection of the northern Tlingit and Athabaskan worlds. Historically an epicenter of astonishing geological dynamism and disruption, biological productivity and diversity, this landscape was also a mecca of cultural exchange, contestation, and appropriation. Ironically, the Alsek-Dry Bay landscape is now “preserved” as the center of a celebrated World Heritage Site based solely on its “natural” landscapes and “wilderness” character, and not for its Indigenous identity as a place of outstanding cultural significance – where the trickster-worldmaker Raven literally transformed the cosmos and topography – and the product of deep cultural-environmental histories. Bringing these ecological perspectives together enables a broader appreciation of the natural and cultural dynamism that has shaped such sites and of the enduring value and lessons of Indigenous knowledge systems that have coevolved with rapidly changing landscapes.

Native Americans study their environment for many reasons but importantly because it is alive and speaking with them. A living university is where they have always lived so there has never been a time when they were not seeking information from the environment, testing their interpretations of what they observe, and formulating conservation behaviors that positively reflect what they and their environment want from each other. Whether this process is termed Native science or culturally sensitive natural interactions, it is a pattern that is typical of the Native American people who have participated in more than 136 ethnographic studies conducted by the authors. Paiute science is illustrated using ethnographic findings from forty-four field studies and the lived experiences of one of the authors.