Human Environmental Dynamics
OUR LAB STUDIES THE INTERACTIVE AND CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PEOPLE AND THEIR SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENTS
Research Themes
◈ Indigenous livelihoods ◈ Cooperation, costly signaling and collective action ◈ Fire ecology and Biodiversity ◈ Anthropogenic seed dispersal ◈ Complex Adaptive Systems ◈ Environmental justice
Methodological Approaches
◈ Ethnoarchaeology ◈ Behavioral ecology and Ethnography ◈ GIS and remote sensing ◈ Landscape ecology/genetics ◈ Social and Spatial networks ◈
Research in progress
Some of the research questions we're working on
People and plant dispersal
Can place-based communities provide important ecosystem services such as seed dispersal?
Indigenous fire ecology
Does cultural burning have a measurable (and positive) impact on plants, animals, and resource sustainability?
Western Desert rock art
Is rock art a form of social coordination in widely dispersed communities?
The historical ecology of fire
Do nomadic foragers modify landscapes in a homogenous or a heterogenous fashion? Were fire mosaics clustered in space and time and what predicts that clustering?
Camelids and tubers
Recent Publications
Greenwood, L. Bliege Bird, R, Nimmo D.G. (2022) Indigenous burning shapes the structure of visible and invisible fire mosaics. Landscape Ecology.
Barclay, P., Bliege Bird, R., Roberts, G., & Számadó, S. (2021). Cooperating to show that you care: Costly helping as an honest signal of fitness interdependence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Bliege Bird, R. and D.W. Bird. (2021) Climate, landscape diversity and food sovereignty in arid Australia: the Firestick Farming Hypothesis. American Journal of Human Biology, e23527.
Morin E, Bird D, Winterhalder B, Bliege Bird R. (2021) Deconstructing hunting returns: can we reconstruct and predict payoffs from pursuing prey? J Archaeol Method Theory