Recent, large fires in the western United States have rekindled debates about fire management and the role of natural fire regimes in the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems. This real-world ...experience parallels debates involving abstract models of forest fires, a central metaphor in complex systems theory. Both real and modeled fire-prone landscapes exhibit roughly power law statistics in fire size versus frequency. Here, we examine historical fire catalogs and a detailed fire simulation model; both are in agreement with a highly optimized tolerance model. Highly optimized tolerance suggests robustness tradeoffs underlie resilience in different fire-prone ecosystems. Understanding these mechanisms may provide new insights into the structure of ecological systems and be key in evaluating fire management strategies and sensitivities to climate change.
Fire is a naturally occurring process of most terrestrial ecosystems as well as a tool for changing land use. Since the beginning of history humans have used fire as a mechanism for creating areas ...suitable for agriculture and settlement. As fires threaten human dominated landscapes, fire risk itself has become a driver of landscape change, impacting landscapes through land use regulations and fire management. Land use changes also influence fire ignition frequency and fuel loads and hence alters fire regimes. The impact of these changes is often exacerbated as new land users demand alternative fire management strategies, which can impact land cover and management far from where land use change has actually occurred. This creates nuanced land use teleconnections between source areas for fires and economic cores, which demand and fund fire protection. Here we will review the role of fire and fire risk as a driver of land use change, the ways land use changes impact drivers of fire, and suggest that the integration of land use teleconnections into the fire/land use discussion can help us better understand and manage the complex interactions between fire and land use.
The Science of Firescapes SMITH, ALISTAIR M.S.; KOLDEN, CRYSTAL A.; PAVEGLIO, TRAVIS B. ...
Bioscience,
02/2016, Letnik:
66, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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Wildland fire management has reached a crossroads. Current perspectives are not capable of answering interdisciplinary adaptation and mitigation challenges posed by increases in wildfire risk to ...human populations and the need to reintegrate fire as a vital landscape process. Fire science has been, and continues to be, performed in isolated “silos,” including institutions (e.g., agencies versus universities), organizational structures (e.g., federal agency mandates versus local and state procedures for responding to fire), and research foci (e.g., physical science, natural science, and social science). These silos tend to promote research, management, and policy that focus only on targeted aspects of the “wicked” wildfire problem. In this article, we provide guiding principles to bridge diverse fire science efforts to advance an integrated agenda of wildfire research that can help overcome disciplinary silos and provide insight on how to build fire-resilient communities.
Large fires in chaparral-dominated shrublands of southern and central California are widely attributed to decades of fire suppression. Prehistoric shrubland landscapes are hypothesized to have ...exhibited fine-grained age-patch mosaics in which fire spread was limited by the age and spatial pattern of fuels. In contrast, I hypothesize that fires during extreme weather conditions have been capable of burning through all age classes of the vegetation mosaic. Using the mapped fire history (1911-1995) of Los Padres National Forest, I analyzed burning patterns for hundreds of fires using a geographic information system (GIS). To estimate the degree of age dependency exhibited by the fire regime at different spatial scales, I employed methods of fire frequency analysis (i.e., fitting a generalized Weibull function to fire interval distributions). Statistics were also calculated using a temporal breakpoint of 1950 to assess possible effects of suppression. Results indicated that shrubland fires have frequently burned through young age classes of vegetation, exhibiting a minimal degree of age dependency. Findings were not scale dependent and were consistent for all but one region of the study area. The anomalous region exhibited a more rapid increase in the hazard of burning with fuel age, reflecting a moderately age-dependent fire regime; this difference probably resulted from the fact that the region is somewhat sheltered from extreme fire weather that commonly affects other shrublands. Exposure to extreme fire weather therefore appears to override the sensitivity of a fire regime to fuels characteristics at the landscape scale. Fire suppression has affected characteristics of smaller fires much more than those of larger fires. Since 1950, there has been a decrease in size and an increase in the number of smaller fires. Findings support the claim that fire suppression could offset ecological risks posed by increasingly frequent human-caused fires in specific areas, but with a net decrease in annual burning rate of ∼14% across the landscape. Findings contradict the assertion that, in the absence of fire suppression, large fires would be constrained by more complex age-patch mosaics on the landscape.
As temperatures soar, forests blaze and houses burn, the media and public may be forced to face up to the reality of a changing climate, says Max A. Moritz.
Increased wildfire frequency and size has led to a surge in flammability research, most of which investigates landscape-level patterns and wildfire dynamics. There has been a recent shift towards ...organism-scale mechanisms that may drive these patterns, as more studies focus on flammability of plants themselves. Here, we examine methods developed to study tissue-level flammability, comparing a novel hot-plate-based method to existing methods identified in a literature review. Based on a survey of the literature, we find that the hot plate method has advantages over alternatives when looking at the specific niche of small-to-intermediate live fuel samples—a size range not addressed in most studies. In addition, we directly compare the hot plate method to the commonly used epiradiator design by simultaneously conducting flammability tests along a moisture gradient, established with a laboratory benchtop drydown. Our design comparison addresses two basic issues: (1) the relationship between hydration and flammability and (2) relationships between flammability metrics. We conclude that the hot plate method compares well to the epiradiator method, while allowing for testing of bigger samples.
Wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent across much of the United States due to anthropogenic climate change. No studies, however, have assessed fire prevalence in lake watersheds at broad ...spatial and temporal scales, and thus it is unknown whether wildfires threaten lakes and reservoirs (hereafter, lakes) of the United States. We show that fire activity has increased in lake watersheds across the continental United States from 1984 to 2015, particularly since 2005. Lakes have experienced the greatest fire activity in the western United States, Southern Great Plains, and Florida. Despite over 30 years of increasing fire exposure, fire effects on fresh waters have not been well studied; previous research has generally focused on streams, and most of the limited lake‐fire research has been conducted in boreal landscapes. We therefore propose a conceptual model of how fire may influence the physical, chemical, and biological properties of lake ecosystems by synthesizing the best available science from terrestrial, aquatic, fire, and landscape ecology. This model also highlights emerging research priorities and provides a starting point to help land and lake managers anticipate potential effects of fire on ecosystem services provided by fresh waters and their watersheds.
Wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent across much of the United States. We show that fire activity has increased in lake watersheds across the continental United States from 1984 to 2015, particularly since 2005. Despite over 30 years of increasing exposure, fire effects on lakes have not been well studied. We propose a conceptual model of how fire may influence the physical, chemical, and biological properties of lakes. This model highlights emerging research priorities and provides a starting point to help land and lake managers anticipate potential effects of fire on ecosystem services provided by lakes and their watersheds.
Coexisting with Wildfire Moritz, Max A.; Knowles, Scott Gabriel
American scientist,
07/2016, Letnik:
104, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Standing in a quiet, burned-out homesite overlooking the coastal town of Santa Barbara CA, six years after flames tore through this community in 2009, the sense of both terror and loss were still ...palpable. The fire-adapted plants on the chaparral-covered hillsides were regenerating, as they have done after wildfires for thousands of years. Many of the homes that burned near-by had been rebuilt, stronger and more fire-resistant, with the hope that they will better withstand the next wild-fire to sweep through the area. Research has long shown that fire is a necessary, natural disturbance in many ecosystems. Even so, much of society's response to fire is still reactive, based on outdated notions of the wildfire problem as simply one of fuel buildup -- an unwelcome remnant of the US Forest Service's focus over many decades on puffing out fires at all costs. The disconnect between knowledge and policy stems largely from current views of wildfire.
Interest in translational ecology (TE) - a research approach that yields useful scientific outcomes through ongoing collaboration between scientists and stakeholders - is growing among both of these ...groups. Translational ecology brings together participants from different cultures and with different professional incentives. We address ways to cultivate a culture of TE, such as investing time in understanding one another's decision context and incentives, and outline common entry points to translational research, such as working through boundary organizations, building place-based research programs, and being open to opportunities as they arise. We also highlight common institutional constraints on scientists and practitioners, and ways in which collaborative research can overcome these limitations, emphasizing considerations for navigating TE within current institutional frameworks, but also pointing out ways in which institutions are evolving to facilitate translational research approaches.
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