Scale complementarity for plant conservation: An example of indigenous plant stewardship from Maine, USA

Background/Question/Methods

Ecosystem and landscape management are prevalent paradigms in environmental conservation. However, there is an increasing recognition that management issues and their solutions occur at many scales, and that cross-scale communication is necessary to achieve desired outcomes. Indigenous stewardship practices have and continue to contribute to the ecology of myriad systems, yet their effects are often unrecognized.  This is particularly significant for culturally important plant species. While indigenous plant stewardship at a variety of ecological scales has been well documented in the Pacific Northwest and Southwestern US, data from the Northeast is lacking.  This paper will explore issues of scale in relation to plant stewardship in the Northern Forest of Maine, highlighting potential areas of scale complementarity for conservation.   Research questions: What type of stewardship practices are currently being employed by Native American plant gatherers in northern Maine? At what ecological and institutional scales do these practices occur? How can these practices be integrated with activities of other land managers for conservation? Semi-structured interviews, group interviews and participant observation with Maliseet and Mi'kmaq plant gatherers, tribal resource managers and other land managers in northern Maine, as well as archival research inform this work.   Data was analyzed for ethnobotanical attributes (eg. plants used, plant part used, habitats, time of harvest), plant stewardship techniques and the scale at which they occur, stewardship preferences, and gathering concerns.

Results/Conclusions

Maliseet and Mi'kmaq plant gatherers currently collect at least 50 species of plants and fungi from a variety of habitats: hardwood dominated forests (30%), coniferous forests(24%), open wetlands(24%), forested wetlands(14%), old fields(24%), and forest edges (32%).  Individual gatherers employ a variety of stewardship techniques at the level of individual plants and plant populations to ensure sustainability of culturally important species including replanting of rhizomes, pruning of shrubs, selective thinning, transplanting and rotation of harvest sites. Community level plant stewardship is carried out by tribal governments in the form of restoration of riparian areas.  Activities are informed by cultural norms, including the concept of T'ankeyudomonen "We must take care of plants". To incorporate indigenous stewardship into plant conservation, institutions implementing management plans at community, ecosystem and landscape scales need to understand how decisions at those scales may impact availability of individual culturally important plant species.  Plant gatherers have detailed knowledge and interactions with individual plants and populations, and can make valuable contributions to larger-scale decisions.