Hala Traditional Agriculture Mapping

Traditional Hawaiian land management is a layered bioregional system. At broad scale, moku were political regions aligned with environmental gradients (temperature, sun, rain), shaping how entire landscapes were used. Over roughly seven to eight years, a documentation effort has combined those customary frameworks with geospatial analysis to inform present land-use choices. The work maps historical agricultural signals against environmental layers—botanical surveys (including 29,000 kukui trees along the Hāmākua Coast), soils, archaeology, archival checks, and modeling at roughly 85% accuracy. A flagship line traces the kou (candlenut-based) system: mapping kukui and breadfruit exposed a sharp break at Laupāhoehoe—breadfruit drops out, kukui patterns and soil fertility shift, coinciding with the boundary (Humuʻula) between the moku of Hilo and Hāmākua. That alignment shows large-scale land care tracked political lines that themselves tracked ecological gradients—even where drivers such as soil fertility are not obvious on the ground. Nested ahupuaʻa ran from mountains to sea, often organized around water, so communities could access a wide resource gradient. Finer kaluulu-style belts (for example Kona’s breadfruit zone) matched environmental limits and cultural preference.