For much of the past century, Western land management has operated under a paradigm of exclusion: fence it off, remove human influence, and let nature recover. This approach has produced important conservation gains, but it has also ignored thousands of years of Indigenous land stewardship that actively shaped and maintained the ecosystems we now seek to restore.
Over the past two years, TerraFuture has been working in partnership with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde to integrate traditional ecological knowledge into our restoration programs at three sites in the Willamette Valley. The results are challenging assumptions about what effective restoration looks like.
The Partnership Framework
This work began with listening. Before any field protocols were developed, our team spent six months in consultation with tribal elders and cultural resource managers to understand the history of land management in the Willamette Valley prior to Euro-American settlement. That process reshaped our understanding of the landscapes we work in.
The Kalapuya people managed the Willamette Valley through controlled burning for at least 8,000 years, maintaining open prairies and oak savannas that supported extraordinary biodiversity. When burning ceased after colonization, Douglas fir encroachment reduced native prairie habitat by an estimated 99.5 percent. The landscapes we were trying to restore had been fundamentally altered by the absence of Indigenous management.
Integrating Prescribed Fire
With guidance from tribal partners and in coordination with the Oregon Department of Forestry, we reintroduced prescribed fire at our 240-acre Chehalem Ridge restoration site in fall 2022. The results after one year were remarkable.
Native wildflower species richness increased by 34 percent in burned areas compared to adjacent unburned control plots. Invasive grass cover, primarily dominated by false brome and meadow foxtail, decreased by 41 percent. Soil microbial diversity, measured through DNA metabarcoding, showed a 28 percent increase in burned plots.
These outcomes exceeded what we had achieved through five years of conventional restoration techniques, including mechanical mowing, herbicide application, and native seed broadcasting, at a fraction of the cost. The per-acre cost of prescribed fire treatment was approximately 380 dollars, compared to 1,200 dollars for our conventional restoration protocol.
Camas Meadow Restoration
A second component of our partnership focuses on restoring camas meadows, a culturally significant food source for Kalapuya people. Working with tribal botanists, we established two camas restoration plots totaling 4.5 acres using traditional planting methods and timing aligned with cultural practices.
After two growing seasons, camas bulb density in our restoration plots has reached 42 bulbs per square meter, compared to 68 per square meter in reference sites with continuous camas presence. Pollinator surveys show that restored camas meadows are already supporting 23 native bee species, with pollinator visitation rates at 78 percent of reference site levels.
When we let go of the assumption that land management begins with Western science, we open ourselves to knowledge systems that have been producing ecological outcomes for millennia.
What the Data Teaches Us
The quantitative results are important, but the deeper lesson is methodological. Indigenous land stewardship is not a historical curiosity. It is a sophisticated, evidence-based approach to ecosystem management that produces measurable outcomes modern restoration science is only beginning to replicate.
Our monitoring data across all three partnership sites shows that integrating traditional ecological knowledge improved restoration outcomes by 25 to 40 percent across key metrics including native plant cover, pollinator abundance, soil carbon, and invasive species suppression, compared to sites managed with conventional techniques alone.
Expanding This Work
Based on these results, TerraFuture is expanding our partnership model to two additional tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest. We are also developing a traditional ecological knowledge integration framework that other restoration organizations can adapt, created in full collaboration with our tribal partners and subject to their review and approval.
This work is not about appropriating Indigenous knowledge. It is about recognizing that effective environmental stewardship requires honoring the people who have been doing this work since long before the concept of conservation existed.
