Douglas Bird
· Professor of AnthropologyPennsylvania State University · Anthropology
Active 1995–2024
About
Douglas Bird, Ph.D., is a Professor of Anthropology at Penn State University. His broad research interests focus on how social and ecological factors interact to influence patterns of resource use and their archaeological expressions. He concentrates on questions related to livelihood decisions and habitats, exploring the dynamics of human subsistence practices, their role in ecosystem function, and their archaeological implications in Australia and Western North America. He has worked closely with Martu Aboriginal communities in Australia’s Western Desert for over 25 years, engaging in research that examines the cultural and ecological landscapes of the region. His scholarly work includes examining the role of fire in landscape architecture and ecological emergence, the significance of cooperative hunting, seed dispersal by indigenous peoples, and the variability in organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups. His contributions extend to understanding climate, landscape diversity, and food sovereignty in arid Australia, as well as the archaeological and anthropological implications of fire mosaics and landscape management. Dr. Bird's research emphasizes the integration of cultural and ecological perspectives to better understand human-environment interactions and resource management in arid landscapes.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Ecology
- Environmental resource management
- Biology
- Geography
- Environmental science
- Political Science
- Natural resource economics
- Economic growth
- Civil engineering
- Engineering
- Evolutionary biology
- Economic geography
- Economics
Selected publications
Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia
Nature Communications · 2024-07-17 · 8 citations
articleOpen accessCommensal relationships between wild plants and their dispersers play a key ecological and evolutionary role in community structure and function. While non-human dispersers are often considered critical to plant recruitment, human dispersers have received much less attention, especially when it comes to non-domesticated plants. Australia, as a continent historically characterized by economies reliant on non-domesticated plants, is thus a key system for exploring the ecological role of people as seed dispersers in the absence of agriculture. Here, we utilize a controlled observation research design, employing ecological surveys and ethnographic observations to examine how seed dispersal and landscape burning by Martu Aboriginal people affects the distribution of three preferred plants and one (edible, but non-preferred) control species. Using an information theoretic approach, we find that the three preferred plants show evidence of human dispersal, with the strongest evidence supporting anthropogenic dispersal for the wild bush tomato, Solanum diversiflorum.
Nature Communications · 2024-09-11
erratumOpen accessThe original version of this Article contained errors in Table 4 and its legend.In Table 4, cells labels were omitted for the cases in which: (i) the predictor was significant in the global model but not in the best model, and (ii) support for anthropogenic dispersal or anthropogenic engineering on presence or abundance.In the legend of Table 4, the significance of the grey shading was incorrectly described.
Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively?
Current Anthropology · 2024-10-01 · 14 citations
articleWe analyze a new ethnographic and ethnohistoric database of quantitative cases (n = 139) and qualitative information on a neglected form of forager subsistence—communal drive hunts (CDHs)—using a human behavioral ecology perspective. Among our key findings are that (i) in specific contexts, CDHs achieve higher return rates or lower odds of failure than encounter hunting; (ii) CDHs increase the rate of success for hunting large ungulates that cluster and have long flight initiation distances and high predator escape velocities; (iii) CDHs engage the benefits and problems of collaborative, sometimes community-wide behavior at scales from the small and opportunistic to the large and institutionalized; (iv) although formerly commonplace, CDHs largely disappeared by the late nineteenth century because of colonial impacts on Indigenous societies and the adoption of repeating rifles and dogs, favoring encounter hunting; (v) cooperative hunting by great apes and indirect archaeological evidence suggest that collaborative hunting is potentially a practice of considerable antiquity and is thus important in the evolution of hominin prosocial behavior; and (vi) while human behavioral ecology has robust models for the analysis of the social distribution of subsistence resources, the development of complementary models for social production is just beginning.
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-03-07 · 13 citations
book-chapterSenior authorAn important adaptive problem for humans and other animals is the acquisition of food. To study foraging strategies, human behavioral ecologists use a number of optimization models, which generally assume that individuals aim to maximize the rate at which they acquire resources. For instance, the prey choice model and its variants highlight the resources that should either be pursued or ignored when they are encountered. The patch choice model and the marginal value theorem, respectively, examine which patches should be exploited by foragers and when they should switch from one patch to another. Foraging strategies are impacted by social considerations, too. The ideal free distribution considers the habitats that foragers should choose while considering the suitability of possible habitats as a function of the number of current occupants. Diverse case studies from ethnographic and archaeological research are discussed. The chapter also highlights opportunities for future studies, including research on the social dimensions of foraging strategies and the ways in which humans can modify environments to enhance foraging returns. There is also a clear need for additional research on the causes and consequences of individual-level variation in foraging ability.
University Press of Florida eBooks · 2023-01-10 · 4 citations
book-chapterInterpreting Pleistocene foragers by analogy with ethnographic hunter-gatherers can be tricky because the former lived in climatic circumstances and at population densities unlike the latter. Our challenge is to use theoretically informed predictions, validated by ethnographic observations, to recognize past behavior that may fall outside the range of ethnographically documented variability. This is no novel insight, but analogies fail if they serve only to explain away the past variation they were intended to clarify. We refer to western Australian hunter-gatherers as an analogy to pose an explanation of Paleoindian obsidian acquisition and conveyance in the Great Basin but are mindful that good analogies serve to build understandings of prehistoric behavior that are grounded in theory and serve to clarify critical similarities and differences between prehistoric and ethnographic cases.
Resource Acquisition Risk and the Division of Labor: Austral Lessons for Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology
Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology/Interdisciplinary contributions to archaeology · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations
book-chapterSenior authorRegenerative landscape design: an integrative framework to enhance sustainability planning
Ecology and Society · 2023 · 19 citations
- Computer Science
- Political Science
- Environmental resource management
Addressing contemporary environmental and social crises requires solutions-based, systems-level changes. To achieve these changes, transdisciplinary research approaches are needed to align problem framing with solution deployment at landscape scales. However, practical frameworks to guide this work are lacking. Here we propose a new framework to help bridge this gap: regenerative landscape design (RLD). We define RLD as a process for finding pattern-based solutions, emphasizing cooperative, iterative, and facilitated engagement for the co-production of locally relevant knowledge for desirable landscape stewardship. To do so, we review how key components of RLD (e.g., landscapes, design thinking, and regenerative processes) have been differentially and unevenly applied in disciplines ranging from resilience, landscape ecology, geography, architecture, agriculture, sociology, tourism, and more. We then put forward research considerations of a RLD approach to enhance social and environmental well-being. We use two emerging case studies (i.e., Chesapeake Bay Watershed, Pennsylvania, USA and Narok County, Kenya) to put forward pathways for implementation of the RLD strategy.
A collaborative agenda for archaeology and fire science
Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2022-05-16 · 24 citations
articleUniversity Press of Florida eBooks · 2022-12-20
book-chapterDeconstructing Hunting Returns: Can We Reconstruct and Predict Payoffs from Pursuing Prey?
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory · 2021-07-28 · 39 citations
articleOpen access
Recent grants
Frequent coauthors
- 52 shared
Rebecca Bliege Bird
Barts Health NHS Trust
- 34 shared
Brian F. Codding
University of Utah
- 12 shared
David Zeanah
California State University, Sacramento
- 6 shared
Fiorenza Micheli
Stanford University
- 6 shared
Hillary S. Young
University of California, Santa Barbara
- 5 shared
Christopher H. Parker
DePaul University
- 5 shared
Jeremy Koster
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
- 4 shared
Douglas W. Yu
Chinese Academy of Sciences
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