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IMAGE: A schematic of what the authors think the landscape and human activity was like over the last 1,200 years in the Fish Lake Plateau region. A) 1,200 to 500 years. view more
Credit: S. Yoshi Maezumi
If you were to visit the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau a thousand years ago, you d find conditions remarkably familiar to the present. The climate was warm, but drier than today. There were large populations of Indigenous people known as the Fremont, a who hunted and grew crops in the area. With similar climate and moderate human activity, you might expect to see the types of wildfires that are now common to the American West: infrequent, gigantic and devastating. But you d be wrong.
Environmental News Network - Indigenous Land-Use Reduced Catastrophic Wildfires on the Fish Lake Plateau enn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from enn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.