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- Info
Fire management
| Author: |
Buckner, E.R.; Turrill, N.L. |
| Date: |
1998 |
| Periodical: |
In: Peine, J.D. ed. Ecosystem management for sustainablilty. New York: Lewis Publishers |
| Abstract: |
Fire is an evolutionary force that has helped shape many terrestrial ecosystems. With the exception of the coldest and wettest regions of the earth, great tracts of land have been subject to periodic fires for millennia. This is true for the southern Appalachian region where several fire-associated and/or fire-dependent pine and oak species require fire to maintain their "natural" community structures. Most of these fire-dependent communities are located on federally owned land. Seventy to 90 years of highly effective fire prevention and suppression has placed several of these pine-oak ecosystems in jeopardy. In the absence of fire, regeneration niches needed to establish fire-dependent species are lost. Today, extensive areas that once supported these communities are without a seed source for their fire-dependent components. On many sites the remaining seed source is from old, decadent trees that are highly vulnerable to insects, especially the southern pine bark beetle -Dendroctonous frontalis -and diseases. Where a viable seed source remains, prompt action to regenerate these communities is essential if they are to remain as ecosystem components in the southern Appalachian region. Increasing and convincing evidence shows that cultural fires maintained these fire-dependent communities over prehistoric millennia. This poses a perceptual problem in that some people argue that forest communities exhibiting cultural influences are not "natural." Accepting this hypothesis, the policy of many public agencies has been to protect forests from fire allowing them to succeed to their "natural" (e.g., no cultural influence) endpoints. However, since landscape and species characteristics evolved under cultural burning, protecting them from such fires would not restore the perceived "natural" condition. Removing cultural burning from landscape management practices would create a condition previously unknown and unnatural to the landscape. MacCleery (1992) proposes that maintaining "naturalness" in public land management, with man in the environment, requires accepting as "natural" all events and conditions that occurred and existed prior to 1492. Management guidelines can be developed based on a knowledge of those conditions provided by archaeologists, palynologists, geographers, and ethnobotanists. Unfortunately, in current literature the use of "natural" as an opposite of "cultural" is too deeply ingrained to be discarded. Managing fire is an extremely complicated and dynamic task. Ecosystem managers face the consequences of using a high-risk tool backed by uncertain science. In addition, prescribed burning is a costly practice. With these constraints, will a public that often has a predetermined, value-laden, preferred ecosystem condition support widespread prescribed burning? This chapter discusses the degree to which fire molded the prehistoric southern Appalachian landscape and suggests management strategies for reintroducing fire as a vector in ecosystem dynamics. |
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