Many thanks to Steve Pyne @sjpyne.bsky.social for his thoughtful comments on our latest paper.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

6/Tree-rings reveal that these patterns persisted for centuries. We need to learn more from Indigenous knowledge and experience built over centuries to millennia to better understand our current wildfire problems and how we can get out of them.

5/Altogether, this meant that climate had much less influence on fire patterns within Ndee landscapes than in the rest of the region.

4/And based on within-ring fire-scar positioning, there was a bias towards greater fire occurrence in late April or May (early earlywood scars), which is when Western Apache (Ndee) people moved back into pine forests each year as part of their seasonal mobility patterns.

3/And by looking at ratios of the fire return intervals of widespread vs. all fires, we were able to show that fires were overwhelmingly small compared to the rest of the region.

2/Using 649 tree-ring samples from across ~48,800 km2 of Western Apache homelands, we show that mean fire intervals were unusually short in Apacheria compared to 3,880 tree-ring samples from across Arizona and New Mexico outside of Apacheria. All samples from dry conifer forests.