Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Research Articles

Climate and human impact on vegetation and fire in an arid Colorado Plateau ecosystem in Western North America

Understanding how arid western North American environments have responded to past climatic conditions can help predict how they respond to anthropogenic climate change. Unfortunately, millennial-length continuous paleoecological records in these regions are scarce. Here we evaluate the human-environmental history of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), USA, back to the Middle Holocene (ca. 7350). Our study presents new records of stratigraphic pollen and charcoal recovered from two sediment cores and pollen recovered from eleven Neotoma (packrat) middens. Our records cover an elevational gradient within pinyon-juniper woodlands, with one core (LP-12-03) recovered from a high elevation site (Lake Pasture) and one core (MC-12-03) and the eleven packrat middens recovered from a low elevation site (Meadow Canyon). Both of these sites contain archaeological records spanning from the Archaic to the Historic with increased occupation during the Formative. We analyze these paleoecological records with the goals of determining how vegetation and fire histories differ over an elevational range, what the records reveal about prehistoric agriculture, and the relative impact of natural climate variability and human land use on the environment through time in southern Utah. Our records provide pinyon-juniper vegetation and fire histories spanning back to the Middle Holocene (ca. 7350 years), evidence of agriculture from Terminal Archaic through Late Prehistoric times (ca. 178–1550 CE) in Meadow Canyon, the utility of non-invasive methods of archaeology in the form of sediment cores and packrat middens, and support for National Register of Historic Places eligibility for archaeological sites surrounding each core location. We conclude that the records of vegetation and fire differ markedly between the high and low elevation sites, the low elevation site contains direct evidence of prehistoric agriculture whereas the high elevation site does not, and that the climate-fire relationship at each site has been buffered by prehistoric land use.

An erg landscape mystery: An exotic boulder in Jurassic aeolian‐fluvial deposits, Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, Utah, USA

An unusually large exotic boulder occurs in strata close to the interfingering transition of the fluvial deposits of the Lower Jurassic Kayenta Formation and aeolian deposits of the Lamb Point Tongue of the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, Utah. This boulder is composed of a weakly bedded, pink, thrombolitic burrowed mudstone and siltstone in a carbonate mudstone matrix. Comparison with similar carbonate units of the region—interpreted as lacustrine in origin and associated with interfingering deposits of Kayenta‐Navajo strata—indicates that the strata from which the boulder originated was likely a product of wind‐blown silt deposited in carbonate mud of a shallow lake. The exotic boulder is clearly embedded in and is eroding out of mostly massive to weakly bedded Jurassic, fine‐ to medium‐grained host sandstone. Nearby, the sandstone is disrupted by soft‐sediment deformation. The upper half of the enclosing sandstone shows low‐angle cross‐stratification that abuts against the edge of the boulder, indicating that Jurassic sedimentation lapped up against the sides of the boulder. Surprisingly, the exotic boulder does not co‐occur with any other clasts of similar lithology, nor is any obvious source lithology present within the immediate area. Lake beds of similar lithology in the same region are not physically traceable to the site where the exotic boulder occurs. The exotic boulder is evidence of the dynamic processes of the Jurassic landscape. The collective characteristics of the massive sandstone with typical polygonal weathering patterns and clusters of clastic pipes in the lower host rock suggest that the exotic boulder was emplaced in one of three ways: (A) fluid overpressurization, likely triggered by strong ground motion, produced the massive and deformed sandstone host and transported the boulder upward in the subsurface; (B) the block was an erosional remnant produced by Jurassic landscape degradation; or (C) the block was transported by a hyperconcentrated overland flow.

Draft Genome Sequence of Exophiala Strain HKRS030, a Fungus Capable of Reducing Iron but Not Nitrate.

Exophiala strain HKRS030 was isolated from a cryptoendolithic community found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in southern Utah, USA. Exophiala strain HKRS030 was observed to dissimilatorily reduce iron(III) while being unable to reduce nitrate.

American Outback

American Outback Leath Tonino (bio) JUST Saturday morning, snow falling soft and white and everywhere. I should be out skiing, building a snowman, relishing this dynamic spring weather, this fleeting absurd life, this body, this earth, while it lasts. Nope. I'm YouTubing on the couch, watching C-SPAN, a testimony before the US House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Federal Lands. Watching the video for the umpteenth time. Watching it and grinding my molars. The man testifying is mustached, in a dark cowboy hat and dark blazer. He sits at a glossy wooden table, thick hands folded together, voice booming with confidence. A piece of me appreciates that his speech is firm and that he is devoted to a place; I suspect we would manage fine if somehow—over breakfast at a cafe in rural Utah, sunnyside eggs and toast, chitchat about Grandad's cattle operation and the local school, pass the salt—we could avoid discussing politics. Big somehow. This rancher, this county commissioner, has flown to D.C. for a specific reason: to oppose the GSENM, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. "Probably twenty percent of that monument is visited …" "But eighty percent of a landmass like that …" "If you don't believe me, come on out, we'll go out and …" I'm refilling my coffee, refreshing the video, banging the spacebar to halt the man mid-sentence, banging it to start him pontificating again. My girlfriend, Sophia, pokes her head into the room and rolls her eyes at this caffeinated Saturday madness. With the dullest of pencils, I'm gouging a notepad. Banging the spacebar, banging the spacebar. Double-checking to ensure a verbatim transcription. "And I'm sorry, people are not going to travel from all over the world to look at sagebrush and regular BLM rangeland …" "There's no tourism value …" "It is just BLM rangeland like you'll find anywhere in the western United States …" Since the presidential proclamation was signed in December of 2017, I've been monitoring the dismemberment of GSENM—the "American outback," to borrow [End Page 68] a longtime wilderness activist's apt nickname. Under the pretense of reining in government overreach, and with dubious legal authority, the monument's borders were redrawn: corners lopped off, corridors severed, protected zones reduced by almost fifty percent. Stroke-of-the-ceremonial-pen style, nearly one million acres were opened to potential abuse from drills, dozers, pavement, noise, industry, extraction, dollars, the gamut. That's bad. But this video, this man, this word echoing after I shut the laptop and drain the coffee and step into the yard to dazedly gaze, to drift with drifting flakes—this is worse. "It is just BLM rangeland" sets off in me a deeper indignation, a more philosophical and fundamental disgust. Argh, the worldview of just. Argh, the self-serving unreflective anthropocentrism of just. Argh, the crime just commits against scarps and rincons, warblers and eagles, coyotes and mice, ferns and cactuses, stillness and silence, thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands (upon thousands!) of pebbles in any given gulch, each pebble a planet, a sphere, rounded and smooth and beyond perfection, beyond any idea in any human mind, any song in any human heart. Snow dampening my hair, I return to the couch, and though it's tempting to continue prowling C-SPAN, I opt instead for Shakespeare, asking Sophia if she'd like to join me in a rousing recitation. Act 3. Scene 1. Alarum. Enter KING HENRY, EXETER, BEDFORD, GLOUCESTER, and Soldiers, with scaling-ladders. ________ Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart "Old cowboys love telling stories about their family on the land." "It's a beautiful thing to be white and come to the West." "There was so much open land, so much land that was unclaimed." "What's not beautiful is what happened to the people who already lived here." "Just to have a conversation with you my ancestors had to survive." "They had to hide and survive." [End Page 69] TO-DO LIST Pull my trusty GSENM...

Tiny, ornamented eggs and eggshell from the Upper Cretaceous of Utah represent a new ootaxon with theropod affinities

A new Cretaceous ootaxon (eggshell type) from the Kaiparowits Formation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is among a growing number of very small eggs described from the Mesozoic. Analyses of two partial eggs (~ 17.7 mm in diameter) and 29 eggshell fragments reveal that this new ootaxon exhibits nodose ornamentation with distinctive branching pore canals that open atop the nodes. Its two-layered microstructure consists of a mammillary layer and a continuous layer with rugged grain boundaries between calcite grains. Although the exact identity of the egg producer is unknown, the eggshell microstructure and small size is consistent with a small-bodied avian or non-avian theropod. The specific combination of small egg size, branching pores, two-layered microstructure, and dispersituberculate ornamentation preserved in this new ootaxon is unique among theropod eggs. This underscores that both eggshell and skeletal fossils of Cretaceous theropods can display a mosaic of transitional morphological and behavioural features characteristic of both avian and non-avian taxa. As such, this new ootaxon increases the diversity of Cretaceous eggs and informs our understanding of the evolution of theropod eggshell microstructure and morphology.

A large pterosaur limb bone from the Kaiparowits Formation (late Campanian) of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah, USA.

Pterosaurs were widespread during the Late Cretaceous, but their fossils are comparatively rare in terrestrial depositional environments. A large pterosaur bone from the Kaiparowits Formation (late Campanian, ~76–74 Ma) of southern Utah, USA, is tentatively identified as an ulna, although its phylogenetic placement cannot be precisely constrained beyond Pterosauria. The element measures over 36 cm in preserved maximum length, indicating a comparatively large individual with an estimated wingspan between 4.3 and 5.9 m, the largest pterosaur yet reported from the Kaiparowits Formation. This size estimate places the individual at approximately the same wingspan as the holotype for Cryodrakon boreas from the penecontemporaneous Dinosaur Park Formation of Alberta. Thus, relatively large pterosaurs occurred in terrestrial ecosystems in both the northern and southern parts of Laramidia (western North America) during the late Campanian.

Advancing predictive modeling in archaeology: An evaluation of regression and machine learning methods on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Predictive models are central to both archaeological research and cultural resource management. Yet, archaeological applications of predictive models are often insufficient due to small training data sets, inadequate statistical techniques, and a lack of theoretical insight to explain the responses of past land use to predictor variables. Here we address these critiques and evaluate the predictive power of four statistical approaches widely used in ecological modeling—generalized linear models, generalized additive models, maximum entropy, and random forests—to predict the locations of Formative Period (2100–650 BP) archaeological sites in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. We assess each modeling approach using a threshold-independent measure, the area under the curve (AUC), and threshold-dependent measures, like the true skill statistic. We find that the majority of the modeling approaches struggle with archaeological datasets due to the frequent lack of true-absence locations, which violates model assumptions of generalized linear models, generalized additive models, and random forests, as well as measures of their predictive power (AUC). Maximum entropy is the only method tested here which is capable of utilizing pseudo-absence points (inferred absence data based on known presence data) and controlling for a non-representative sampling of the landscape, thus making maximum entropy the best modeling approach for common archaeological data when the goal is prediction. Regression-based approaches may be more applicable when prediction is not the goal, given their grounding in well-established statistical theory. Random forests, while the most powerful, is not applicable to archaeological data except in the rare case where true-absence data exist. Our results have significant implications for the application of predictive models by archaeologists for research and conservation purposes and highlight the importance of understanding model assumptions.

Decomposing Habitat Suitability Across the Forager to Farmer Transition

ABSTRACT How might subsistence strategies structure the costs and benefits of habitat selection and, therefore, drive settlement patterning? We explore this question within an Ideal Distribution framework, arguing that (i) a habitat can be decomposed into its environmental covariates, (ii) their relative contributions to suitability can vary as a function of subsistence strategy, and (iii) the resulting differences will in turn lead to different population distributions across habitats. To evaluate these claims, we apply a Poisson point-process modelling approach known as maximum entropy (MaxEnt) to Archaic hunter-gatherer and Formative maize-farmer sites within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Our results show that environmental covariates vary in their importance for each strategy and that the strategies themselves vary in their land use and habitat distribution, with Archaic foragers being widely distributed across space, Formative farmers more densely packed into areas indicative of higher maize productivity. The approach itself also has wide application to other subsistence strategies, including horticulture and pastoralism, across a range of environmental conditions.

A Genealogy of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: Considering the Future of Federal Public Lands

In September 1996, President Clinton proclaimed the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in southern Utah in order to protect its scientific and historic resources. In December 2017, President Trump reduced the size of the Monument by 46 percent and opened the excluded lands to motorized vehicles, energy and mineral development, and sale or other disposition. His action was immediately challenged by multiple lawsuits which will take years to settle in court. This article examines these events and the shifting management of U.S. public lands through the lens of governmentality. It traces the genealogy of GSENM as perceptions of public lands shifted from vacant, to possessing valuable natural resources, to national landscapes, to show how new forms of management and governmentality arose and were contested. Using these insights, it considers what current trends in public land management suggest about an emerging neoliberal governmentality and the future of public lands.

The Wind-Swept Nautilus, Enigmatic Clastic Pipes, and Toadstool Landforms: Geologic Features of the Paria Plateau

The Colorado Plateau occupies much of the southwestern United States including portions of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. This region presents unobstructed views from mesa tops, beautifully colored soils, lone standing buttes, and canyons cut thousands of feet deep. The Colorado Plateau represents a well-preserved window into the Earth’s history. Today, the rocks of the Colorado Plateau lie roughly horizontally, as they were deposited hundreds of millions of years ago. The Plateau’s rise has motivated rivers, in their downhill progress, to carve innumerable canyons. These river canyons allow any nature-lover the opportunity to gaze at 100s of millions of years of geologic history. Within the larger Colorado Plateau, the Paria Plateau straddles the Utah and Arizona borders, and includes the Vermilion Cliff s National Monument, the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area, and the southern extent of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (GSENM; pre-2018 boundaries). The Paria Plateau is best known for spectacularly colored, wind-sculpted features such as Coyote Buttes and “The Wave,” where vivid colors accent cross-strata resembling a cresting ocean wave. The Plateau is also recognized for the geologically notable Vermilion Cliff s, Buckskin Gulch slot canyon, White Pocket area, and the Paria River Canyon. Although only two, dual-lane highways circumvent the plateau, several wash-boarded gravel and deeply mud-rutted roads allow access to its interior. From these dirt roads, a few sandy, four-wheel drive paths diminish as they extend and branch into the plateau’s interior. Overall, the Paria Plateau is a relatively quiet and little-visited wilderness.

Osteology of the Late Triassic Bipedal Archosaur Poposaurus gracilis (Archosauria: Pseudosuchia) from Western North America.

Poposaurus gracilis is a bipedal pseudosuchian archosaur that has been poorly understood since the discovery of the holotype fragmentary partial postcranial skeleton in 1915. Poposaurus. gracilis is a member of Poposauroidea, an unusually morphologically divergent clade of pseudosuchians containing taxa that are bipedal, quadrupedal, toothed, edentulous, and some individuals with elongated thoracic neural spines (i.e., sails). In 2003, a well preserved, fully articulated, and nearly complete postcranial skeleton of P. gracilis was discovered with some fragmentary cranial elements from the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument of southern Utah, USA. The aim of this work is to describe the osteology of this specimen in detail and compare P. gracilis to other closely related pseudosuchian archosaurs. The open neurocentral sutures throughout the majority of the vertebral column, the small size of this individual, and the presence of seven evenly spaced cyclic growth marks in the histologically sectioned femur indicate that this specimen was a skeletally immature juvenile, or subadult when it died. The pes of P. gracilis contains multiple skeletal adaptations and osteological correlates for soft tissue structures that support a hypothesis of digitigrady for this taxon. When coupled with the numerous postcranial characters associated with cursoriality, and the many anatomical traits convergent with theropod dinosaurs, this animal likely occupied a similar ecological niche with contemporaneous theropods during the Late Triassic Period. Anat Rec, 303:874-917, 2020. © 2019 American Association for Anatomy.

Reducing protected lands in a hotspot of bee biodiversity: bees of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is a federally protected area found in central southern Utah. Designated in 1996 by President William J. Clinton, it was recently reduced in size by President Donald J. Trump in a proclamation that turned the one large monument into three smaller ones. A long-term, standardized study of the bees had been conducted from 2000–2003, revealing 660 species. The bee communities of the area are characterized by being spatially heterogeneous; most of the bees occur in isolated areas, with only a few being both abundant and widespread. Here we examine what affect the recent resizing of the monument has on the number, and ecology, of the bees now excluded from monument boundaries. Using the new monument boundaries and the geographic coordinates associated with each bee, we derived new species lists for each of the three monuments, and compared them to each other, and to the excluded lands. All three monuments now protect unique faunas, with Bray–Curtis similarity values not exceeding 0.59%. Each monument now harbors species not found in the other two monuments. We found that 84 bee species are no longer protected by any of the three monuments. These 84 species were not concentrated in one area that is now excluded, but were scattered throughout the newly excluded lands. For some of the excluded bee species, there is no evidence that they are rare or imperiled, being widespread throughout the west. However, there is a concentration of bees in the southern and eastern former monument lands that represent range extensions from nearby hot deserts. In addition to numerous range extensions, the list of excluded bees also contains several undescribed species (newly discovered species that have not yet been named and described by taxonomists) and morphospecies (individuals that are morphologically distinct, but that require additional research before species designations can be made). This indicates that the bee communities housed in these excluded areas would benefit from additional scientific inquiry. The areas now excluded from monument protections house a greater proportion of the original GSENM bee community than any of the three new monument units. We conclude this paper by discussing what the smaller monuments might mean for bee conservation in this hot spot of bee biodiversity and suggest that bee communities here and elsewhere should be taken into account when conservation decisions are being made.

Wild bees of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: richness, abundance, and spatio-temporal beta-diversity.

Interest in bees has grown dramatically in recent years in light of several studies that have reported widespread declines in bees and other pollinators. Investigating declines in wild bees can be difficult, however, due to the lack of faunal surveys that provide baseline data of bee richness and diversity. Protected lands such as national monuments and national parks can provide unique opportunities to learn about and monitor bee populations dynamics in a natural setting because the opportunity for large-scale changes to the landscape are reduced compared to unprotected lands. Here we report on a 4-year study of bees in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), found in southern Utah, USA. Using opportunistic collecting and a series of standardized plots, we collected bees throughout the six-month flowering season for four consecutive years. In total, 660 bee species are now known from the area, across 55 genera, and including 49 new species. Two genera not previously known to occur in the state of Utah were discovered, as well as 16 new species records for the state. Bees include ground-nesters, cavity- and twig-nesters, cleptoparasites, narrow specialists, generalists, solitary, and social species. The bee fauna reached peak diversity each spring, but also experienced a second peak in diversity in late summer, following monsoonal rains. The majority of GSENM’s bees are highly localized, occurring in only a few locations throughout the monument, and often in low abundance, but consistently across the four years. Only a few species are widespread and super-abundant. Certain flowering plants appear to be inordinately attractive to the bees in GSENM, including several invasive species. GSENM protects one of the richest bee faunas in the west; the large elevational gradient, incredible number of flowering plants, and the mosaic of habitats are all likely contributors to this rich assemblage of bees.

Core bacterial community composition of a cryptoendolithic ecosystem in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah.

Cryptoendolithic bacterial communities in the Jurassic Navajo Sandstones play an important ecological role in this ecosystem. Developing a better understanding of the role of these cryptoendolithic communities required a deeper knowledge of the microbial diversity present. We analyzed the bacterial diversity in eight sandstones samples from several microgeological features associated with a large sandstone dome. Cryptoendolithic bacterial diversity is clustered into three distinct groups which correlated with topography, suggesting the duration of water retention might be a factor. Comparisons of diversity between each cluster showed that a core bacterial community exists in this habitat. The overall bacterial community structure was dominated by Cyanobacteria, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Actinobacteria. The most prevalent genera in cyanobacteria were Leptolyngbya, Chroococcidiopsis, and unclassified cyanobacteria accounting for the bulk of cyanobacterial sequences. Within the Proteobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria were the largest class detected, with members of the Acetobacteraceae, particularly the genus Acidiphilium, being the most abundant. Acidiphilium spp. are capable of aerobic ferric iron reduction under moderately acidic conditions, explaining the high levels of iron (II) in this system. This study highlights the extent of unexplored bacterial diversity in this habitat system and sets the premise for elaborating on the ecological function of cryptoendolithic communities.

Neither Boon nor Bane: The Economic Effects of a Landscape-Scale National Monument

The designation of landscape-scale national monuments has generated intense debate as to whether their regional economic effects are positive or negative. National monuments can restrict land uses, thus favoring economic development based on the low-wage tourism industry relative to higher-wage extractive industries. Utah’s Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument has been managed for landscape-scale conservation while protecting existing valid uses. We assess postdesignation trends in the ranching, mining, and tourism industries, after which pre- and postdesignation paths of per capita income are examined using difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods. We conclude that monument designation had no effect on regional per capita income.

Rage, Grief, Ceremony, and Praise in the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument

Abstract In the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, responding to the political and ecocidal assault on wildlands with ceremonies of praise for the holy Earth while on a wander into both a...

EDITORIAL

When John F. Kennedy described Washington, D.C. as a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm, it was presumably not intended as a compliment. Nonetheless, like all good quotes, it captures a wider truth—a capital city as the pivot of a vast and diverse nation, a symbolic and political, if not geographic, centre. In this sense, the choice of Washington, D.C. to host the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), 11–15 April 2018, was more than coincidence. With a still relatively new administration in the White House making policy changes with significant implications for the nation's cultural heritage, the gathering of more than 5000 archaeologists from the USA and beyond offered the opportunity to lobby politicians and policymakers on their home turf. Delegates were accordingly encouraged to contact their elected representatives, and the SAA Government Affairs Program pursued meetings on Capitol Hill to press the case for the protection and promotion of cultural heritage. The theme was reinforced through the SAA Presidential Sponsored Forum, entitled ‘Bears Ears, the Antiquities Act, and the Status of our National Monuments’, where the panel reflected on the effectiveness of the Antiquities Act of 1906 (now safeguarding over one million square kilometres of US territory) and the emerging threats to the protection it provides. In particular, the unprecedented proposal by the new administration to reduce significantly the size of one of the most recent additions to the list, the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah (as well as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument), has led to concerns—and lawsuits—over political interference and the weakening of the protection that the Act provides for sites and landscapes across the USA.

Whose Lands? Which Public? Trump's National Monument Proclamations and the Shape of Public-Lands Law

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. If President Trump’s shrinkages stand, they will be the largest removal of public lands from protected status in U.S. history, and will put the remaining national monuments on the chopping block. This article advances a novel theory showing that the President lacks the power to revise or revoke monuments. The Antiquities Act gives a power only to protect public lands, not to remove them from protection. Arguments developed so far in litigation and scholarship fail to recognize a general feature of public-lands law: It consistently denies the President the power unilaterally to remove lands from statutorily protected categories once they are placed within those categories. The Antiquities Act should be read to be consistent with this field-wide pattern. The article explicates the reasons for this pattern. Generally speaking, public-lands law has been very little theorized; but it needs a theory now. Public-lands law is a field defined by structured normative pluralism. It integrates a range of deeply conflicting public-lands purposes, from mining and drilling to wilderness preservation, across a range of statutes and agencies and acreage totaling nearly a third of the land area of the United States. The asymmetric premise against any Presidential power remove lands from protection is rooted in this structure, specifically the President’s obligation to preserve for Congress the option of protecting lands, and the dangers of hasty or corrupt Presidential action. The article traces these rationales across the history of statutory, executive, and judicial articulations of public-lands law and shows that they apply to the present Antiquities Act dispute. The article also highlights the political and cultural dimension of the dispute: a series of three-way conflicts among “public-lands populists” who seek increased use of and access to public lands (whose agenda the Trump Administration has incorporated into its economic and ethno-national populism), recreationists and environmentalists, and indigenous communities in the Bears Ears region. Conflicts among these groups amount to fights over collective identity--the nature of the “public” that public lands should serve. This dimension of the conflict does not fall outside the doctrinal analysis of the Antiquities Act. Rather, with a clear theoretical view of public-lands law, it is possible to see that these agendas are already integral to the field itself. They are central threads of its pluralism, and their competing claims fit within its structure. An account of the larger field of cultural conflict both enriches the theory of public-lands law and helps to show how the field should resolve the present fight.

Cyanomargarita gen. nov. (Nostocales, Cyanobacteria): convergent evolution resulting in a cryptic genus.

Two populations of Rivularia-like cyanobacteria were isolated from ecologically distinct and biogeographically distant sites. One population was from an unpolluted stream in the Kola Peninsula of Russia, whereas the other was from a wet wall in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a desert park-land in Utah. Though both were virtually indistinguishable from Rivularia in field and cultured material, they were both phylogenetically distant from Rivularia and the Rivulariaceae based on both 16S rRNA and rbcLX phylogenies. We here name the new cryptic genus Cyanomargarita gen. nov., with type species C.melechinii sp. nov., and additional species C.calcarea sp. nov. We also name a new family for these taxa, the Cyanomargaritaceae.

First reported actinopterygian from the Navajo Sandstone (Lower Jurassic, Glen Canyon Group) of southern Utah, USA

AbstractWe report the first occurrence of an actinopterygian fish from the Lower Jurassic Navajo Sandstone, discovered in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, U.S.A. The site contains multiple individuals, preserved within an interdune deposit, possessing the elongate modified dorsal scales usually characterizing semionotiform fishes. The presence of moderately sized fish provides further evidence that interdune oases were occasionally persistent environmental habitats within the greater Navajo dune system, and that the paleobiota is still woefully undersampled. Additionally, this site could help fill a gap in the actinopterygian fossil record between the patchy Lower Jurassic and better-known Middle Jurassic documentation of western North America.