Interval squeeze: altered fire regimes and demographic responses interact to threaten woody species persistence as climate changes

By Neal J. Enright, J. B. Fontaine, D. Bowman, Ross A. Bradstock, Richard J. Williams. 2015

468 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Projected effects of climate change across many ecosystems globally include more frequent disturbance by fire and reduced plant growth due to warmer (and especially drier) conditions. Such changes affect species - particularly fire-intolerant woody plants - by simultaneously reducing recruitment, growth, and survival. Collectively, these mechanisms may narrow the fire interval window compatible with population persistence, driving species to extirpation or extinction. We present a conceptual model of these combined effects, based on synthesis of the known impacts of climate change and altered fire regimes on plant demography, and describe a syndrome we term interval squeeze. This model predicts that interval squeeze will increase woody plant extinction risk and change ecosystem structure, composition, and carbon storage, especially in regions projected to become both warmer and drier. These predicted changes demand new approaches to fire management that will maximize the in situ adaptive capacity of species to respond to climate change and fire regime change.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4484206bcecbcf88ac8065c3b3b2c8e75e38e11

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Biogeography of fire regimes in western U.S. conifer forests: A trait‐based approach (2020, background): “…although with ongoing anthropogenic and climate-driven shortening of fire return intervals in such crown-fire-adapted ecosystems, these species are also at risk of population declines (Enright et al., 2015; Turner, Braziunas, Hansen, & Harvey, 2019; Whitman, Parisien, Thompson, & Flannigan, 2019).”
Influences of fire–vegetation feedbacks and post‐fire recovery rates on forest landscape vulnerability to altered fire regimes (2018, background): “There are several ways that climate change could both increase fire activity and slow post- fire forest recovery (Table 1), producing an “interval squeeze” that narrows or eventually eliminates the fire- interval window in which forests persist (Enright et al., 2015).”