Land acknowledgment

This open educational resource was developed at the University of British Columbia, whose Vancouver campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. UBC’s Okanagan campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.

The forestry datasets used throughout this book describe lands that are the traditional territories of many First Nations across British Columbia and Ontario — including the Coast Salish peoples (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh / Squamish, Səl̓ílwətaʔ / Tsleil-Waututh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm / Musqueam), the Stó:lō Nation, the Syilx, the Tsilhqot’in, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and many others not named here.

Indigenous peoples have practiced sophisticated, place-based forest stewardship across these lands for thousands of years before, during, and after the introduction of Western quantitative methods. The tools taught in this book — Excel spreadsheets, statistical summaries, ggplot2 charts, sf geometries, leaflet maps — are one way of describing and reasoning about forest ecosystems. They are not the only way.

We acknowledge that data about Indigenous lands has historically been collected and used in ways that have not always respected Indigenous data sovereignty, and that the responsibility to work in good relationship with First Nations rests with every practitioner using these tools.