Climatic and human influences on fire regimes in temperate forest ecosystems in North and South America

ALABACK, P.; VEBLEN, T.T.; WHITLOCK, C.; LARA, A.,; KITZBERGER, T.; VILLALBA, R.

How Landscapes Change

Springer - Verlag

Lugar: Berlín; Año: 2003; p. 49 - 88

Fire plays an integral role in regulating ecosystem structure and processes including biodiversity, nutrient cycling, ecosystem structure, resiliency, stability, and carbon flow. These effects of fire on ecosystems are extremely sensitive to all components of the disturbance regime (frequency, intensity, scale, predictability). To properly evaluate the impact of human activities on fire – both now and in the future – it is critical that we have an accurate baseline of past fire occurrences. In particular, we need to understand the natural role of fire in ecosystems across a range of scales from stands or sites to broad regions. In addition, we need to understand the controls that govern fire regimes across landscapes, so that we can better understand both how natural systems worked in the past and how fire regimes might be changed in the future. There is a clear need for a broader view of fire on a larger scale in order to place the complex interactions between localized and regional human activities and climatic controls in proper perspective. In forests this becomes an even more challenging task because trees integrate the cumulative effects of both natural processes and human activities over time scales of years and decades to centuries. To understand climatic controls and their broad-scale effects on vegetation, even larger time scales (millennial) are required.