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Cultural Burning for Sourberry Basketry Material in Mariposa County, 2022-2023

April 18, 2025
Development of this research design attempted to help understand the effects of differing cultural cultivation techniques of sourberry shrubs (Rhus aromatica) for basketry material in Mariposa County. With the permission of Chairman Ron Goode, a randomized complete block design experiment was implemented in a old growth sourberry stand to assess quantitative measures of basketry production. Median plant height was assessed for each treatment area before any application of cultural management. Each 10m x 10m block contains four plots (4m x 4m) that have treatments randomly selected for each plot. Randomly selected treatments are one of the following: (1) Control, (2) Coppicing, (3) Coppicing + Burning, (4) Coppicing + Burning + Raking (or the subsequent mixing of ash back into the soil profile). Due to difficulty in implementation of treatments, block size was limited to 3 for this pilot study. Each treatment was implemented in the winter of 2022. Basketry material was harvested by community basket weavers in late summer/early fall of 2023, before the research team could evaluate basketry materials. The research team pivoted count data to assess the total number of quality basketry sticks harvested from each treatment. 6410 sourberry stems were counted in all of the blocks, and 177 stems were harvested.
Publication Year 2025
Title Cultural Burning for Sourberry Basketry Material in Mariposa County, 2022-2023
DOI 10.5066/P17SW43A
Authors Landin Noland
Product Type Data Release
Record Source USGS Asset Identifier Service (AIS)
USGS Organization National Climate Adaptation Science Center
Rights This work is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal
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