Traditional ecological knowledge: an important facel of natural resources conservation. Technical Note 1.

For over 10,000 years, American Indians from diverse tribes have lived in the United States. Natural resource management is not a modern invention; Indianshave practiced the roots of this applied discipline for millennia. Our North American landscapes, a reflection of historical processes, both natural and cultural, bear the indelible imprint of a medley of lifeways. The native peoples harvested and tended the wilds for millennia: replanting cormlets of brodiaeas to ensure future production, burning under oaks to discourage insect pests, allowing for rest periods between sedge rhizome harvests, and maintaining native grasses and wildflowers with edible seed with fire in tallgrass prairies, montane meadows, and the understories of open oak and conifer forests. Some of our rare and endangered plants and early successional landscapes depended upon deliberate well-informed American Indian action. Therefore those landscapes and plants are at risk now, because we've forgotten about this essential component of those ecosystens - humans. These Technical Notes give a step-by-step guide of how to delve into our rich human past, to reconstruct historic land use and management examples from California. Land managers and restorationists are discovering that ancient cultural practices—burning, pruning, thinning, weeding of native plants - are not passé. These techniques have direct application to the restoration and management of our natural resources and biodiversity today.