More than $900,000 in grant funding is going to researchers and conservationists at the Coeur d’Alene Tribe to develop their strategies for ecosystem restoration and climate resilience.
The Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s efforts are focused on restoring the native grasslands and prairies of the Palouse, as well as testing out an alternative grain called Kernza.
But first, this grant will allow researchers to evaluate the strategies and collect data to determine what’s most effective. And in some aspects like soil health, the researchers still need to establish what their baseline statistics are, according to Associate Professor of Forest Science and enrolled Coeur d’Alene tribal member Danielle Ignace, who’s helping to lead the project.
“If we have these systems that are often overlooking and not measuring the soil component, that's really a fundamental problem, right?” she said. “Because if we have soils that are there, whether they're being disturbed, degraded, or improved, how do we know what the treatments are?
“What are the impacts of those treatments? And who's there and how these different organisms are interacting and what that means for soil health? Because soil health is literally the foundation of what helps enhance these ecosystems.”
Other strategies that the team is pursuing include a more holistic approach to restoring ecosystems. The tribe’s researchers and botanists will collect seeds from the remnants of the native prairie to start a seed bank and expand the Palouse grassland area with a variety of species native to the region — species that have already evolved to thrive in the conditions of the Inland Northwest.
“One of the things that we see in Western science historically is sort of focusing in on a single species,” Laura Laumatia, Environmental Programs Manager for the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, said. “But we're thinking about the broad plant community… Even the plant-soil microbial interactions are things that are poorly understood and were understood in some way or form by the Coeur d'Alene tribe, and they worked in harmony with these systems.”
But the traditional approach isn’t in conflict with the way many scientists approach climate science and technological advancements, Ignace told SPR News.
“Even though we have these climate-based solutions and that we're thinking about this on the landscape level,” she said. “And while that might not mean more of a technological development or technological solution, it definitely doesn't mean we're avoiding the technological side of things because we really see this as a fantastic opportunity to kind of meld those together.”
“We kind of really see this as a combination of returning to what we've always done as a tribe and what we see other tribal communities doing, but having a way to measure that and see what's really happening with the system,” she said.
Ignace’s focus on soil health and carbon storage goes hand in hand with one of the other strategies the team is evaluating: Kernza.
It’s a grain developed by the Land Institute that has already seen some success in the Midwest. It differs from grains like wheat because it’s a perennial species, which means farmers don’t have to till their field and replant it every season, and that means less soil is lost.
“Along with keeping the soil in place, you're allowing that plant that is able to grow much deeper roots than, say, wheat, building carbon storage back into the soil,” Laumatia said.
The $937,212 in grant money going toward the development of these strategies is part of a raft of funding from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation for natural climate solutions, which aim to combat climate change through landscape-level changes that protect and restore native ecosystems and improve management of wild and agricultural lands.
“We are in a critical window where natural climate solutions have immense potential to accelerate climate change mitigation efforts while also providing key biodiversity and human well-being co-benefits,” Yuta Masuda, director of science for the foundation, said in a statement.
Other grant recipients include the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, Native Conservancy, Nisqually Indian Tribe, Trout Unlimited, and the University of British Columbia.
“With projects like this we often see it's a lot of research, researching questions, technology, equipment, fancy equipment that goes into kind of quantifying what's happening with these systems, and often the community side is kind of left out of this,” Ignace said. “And I think the community was really at the center of this.”
“It's not just about using this fancy equipment to measure carbon capture and soil health over time but we really still think about the community on a daily basis and how do we interact with them and communicate with them what's going on and disseminating the information in a really respectful way.”
