About

Rebecca Bliege Bird, Ph.D., is an ecological anthropologist interested in the socioecology of subsistence in small scale societies. She pursues topics such as the gender division of labor in hunting and gathering, cooperation, costly signaling, indigenous conservation and land management, and fire ecology. Her research draws on theory, models, and methods from behavioral ecology and landscape ecology to answer questions about how local social contexts influence economic decision-making and how such decisions impact local ecological communities.

Research topics

• Ecology
• Biology
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental science
• Political Science
• Evolutionary biology
• Engineering
• Economic growth
• Agroforestry
• Physical geography
• Environmental ethics
• Archaeology
• Epistemology
• Natural resource economics
• Economics
• Economic geography

Selected publications

• A global expert elicitation on present-day human–fire interactions

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2025-04-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Human fire use contributes to fire regimes and benefits societies worldwide yet is poorly understood at the global scale. We present the Global Fire Use Survey (GFUS), an effort to elicit and systematize knowledge about fire use from experts, including academics and practitioners. The GFUS data cover the stakeholders using fire, reasons for and seasonality of burning, recent trends in anthropogenic ignitions and burned area and the presence/absence and effectiveness of different policy interventions targeting fire use. The survey garnered 311 responses for regions covering over 50% of the Earth's ice-free land, improving on the coverage of literature syntheses on fire use. Here, we analyse the data on the distribution of fire use and policy interventions. The survey suggests that the most widespread fire users are Indigenous and local people burning to meet objectives associated with small-scale livelihoods and cultural priorities, whereas burning by commercial land users, state agencies and non-governmental organizations is less widespread. Regulatory restrictions are the most common policy interventions targeting fire use but are ineffective in achieving their aims in regions with higher burned area. While community-led governance of burning is rarer, it was deemed more effective than restrictive policy interventions, particularly in regions with higher burned area.This article is part of the theme issue 'Novel fire regimes under climate changes and human influences: impacts, ecosystem responses and feedbacks'.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘Megafire’—You May Not Like It, But You Cannot Avoid It

  Global Ecology and Biogeography · 2025-04-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Aim The term ‘megafire’ is increasingly used to describe large fires worldwide. We proposed a size‐based definition of megafire—fires exceeding 10,000 ha arising from single or multiple related ignition events. A recent perspective in Global Ecology and Biogeography argues against a size‐based definition of megafire and suggest that the term is too emotive for scientific use. We highlight that many scientific terms originate from common terms. These terms are often defined once they enter the scientific lexicon, enhancing both scientific understanding and public communication. We argue that standardised definitions facilitate better prediction, preparation, and management of fire events. Location Worldwide. Time Period 2022–2023. Methods We conducted an updated structured review of the term ‘megafire’ and its use and definition in the peer‐reviewed scientific literature, collating definitions and descriptions and identifying the criteria frequently invoked to define the term. Results We demonstrate an increase in the use of ‘megafire’ in the scientific literature since our original definition in 2022, with many studies adopting the > 10,000 ha size‐based criterion. Main Conclusions We contend that abandoning the term is neither practical, possible, nor beneficial. Instead, consistent usage underpinned by clear definitions is essential. Adopting a clear, size‐based definition of megafire strengthens clarity and comparability across research and management practices globally. Precision in terminology is crucial for advancing research, improving communication, and informing effective fire management and policy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

  Nature Communications · 2024-07-17 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Commensal 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.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Haemodynamic response to pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia in trauma patients within an urban helicopter emergency medical service

  European Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery · 2024-02-01 · 5 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Division of Labor

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-03-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Divisions of labor are common among many species. They occur when some sets of individuals (usually defined by age or gender) regularly perform specific tasks, either as a result of individual decision-making patterned by social and ecological contexts (differences in labor), or emerging from an organized, cooperative task specialization designed to benefit a larger collective (divisions of labor). This chapter explores both differences in labor and divisions of labor by drawing on ethnographic cases of subsistence production. These case studies illustrate how intrinsic variation in size and strength may structure differences in labor by age, and they demonstrate how variation in the assessment of acquisition risk may influence women's and men's subsistence decisions. These differences may lead to true cooperative divisions of labor when team rates, bargaining, or signaling reduce conflicts of interest between individuals, in turn facilitating increased returns to scale for larger collectives, families, households, or other unit of economic production. Understanding the maintenance of patterns in "divisions of" and "differences in" labor provides a firmer foundation for explanatory models of human decision-making, ranging from questions about the emergence of our genus to contemporary patterning in occupational specialization and gender identity.

  PublisherDOI

• Global research priorities for historical ecology to inform conservation

  Endangered Species Research · 2024-05-14 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access

  Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ∼12000 yr. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or underrepresented, restricting their full potential. Here, scholars and practitioners working in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments on 6 continents and various archipelagoes synthesize knowledge from the fields of history, anthropology, paleontology, and ecology with the goal of describing global research priorities for historical ecology to influence conservation. We used a structured decision-making process to identify and address questions in 4 key priority areas: (1) methods and concepts, (2) knowledge co-production and community engagement, (3) policy and management, and (4) climate change impacts. This work highlights the ways that historical ecology has developed and matured in its use of novel information sources, efforts to move beyond extractive research practices and toward knowledge co-production, and application to management challenges including climate change. We demonstrate the ways that this field has brought together researchers across disciplines, connected academics to practitioners, and engaged communities to create and apply knowledge of the past to address the challenges of our shared future.

  PublisherDOI

• Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively?

  Current Anthropology · 2024-10-01 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author

  We 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.

  PublisherDOI

• Author Correction: Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

  Nature Communications · 2024-09-11

  erratumOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The 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.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Indigenous pyrodiversity promotes plant diversity

  Biological Conservation · 2024-02-07 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  Pyrodiversity (temporally and spatially diverse fire histories) is thought to promote biodiversity by increasing environmental heterogeneity and replicating Indigenous fire regimes, yet studies of pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships from areas under active Indigenous fire stewardship are rare. Here, we explored whether Indigenous pyrodiversity promoted plant richness and diversity in an arid ecosystem from north-western Australia. We selected landscapes that ranged from highly pyrodiverse and under active Indigenous burning to more coarse-scale and less diverse mosaics under lightning fire regimes. We modelled how the visible (time-since-fire diversity and proportion of post-fire successional stages) and invisible fire mosaic (fire frequency diversity and maximum proportion of landscape burnt) influenced plant richness and diversity, including edible plants. We found evidence that pyrodiversity maintained by Indigenous people increases the richness and diversity of some plant groups: time-since-fire diversity was associated with higher total plant richness and diversity; fire frequency diversity was associated with higher total plant diversity; and total plant diversity decreased with increasing the maximum proportion of a landscape that had burnt. Additionally, we found that some plant groups, including culturally important edible plants, were sensitive to the spatial extent of specific fire ages. By linking our previous work that shows Indigenous burning promotes pyrodiversity and reduces fire size, we find evidence for the notion that Indigenous fire stewardship, through the provision of pyrodiversity, promotes plant richness and diversity. Our work highlights the importance of Indigenous burning for maintaining and promoting plant diversity in fire-prone ecosystems.

  PublisherDOI

• 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-chapter
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• A co-evolutionary approach to a complex adaptive system

  NSF · $305k · 2015–2016

• The Ecology of Production, Reproduction and Cooperation among the Mardu

  NSF · $90k · 2005–2007

• Anthropogenic Fire, Human Foraging Strategies, and Ecosystem Dynamics in the Western Desert of Australia

  NSF · $500k · 2009–2014

• CNH: Indigenous Fire Regimes, Land-Use Ecology, and Contemporary Livelihoods in Northern California

  NSF · $250k · 2012–2014

• The Ecology of Production, Reproduction and Cooperation among the Mardu

  NSF · $275k · 2003–2005

Frequent coauthors

• Douglas W. Bird

  52 shared

• Brian F. Codding

  University of Utah

  29 shared

• Catherine L. Parr

  University of Liverpool

  15 shared

• David Zeanah

  California State University, Sacramento

  12 shared

• Gavin M. Jones

  Stanford University

  12 shared

• Michael‐Shawn Fletcher

  University of Wollongong

  12 shared

• Diane K. Brockman

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  11 shared

• Dale G. Nimmo

  9 shared

Labs

• Center for Human Evolution and DiversityPI