Long-Term Fire Regime Estimated from Soil Charcoal in Coastal Temperate Rainforests
By Ken Lertzman, D. Gavin, D. Hallett, L. Brubaker, D. Lepofsky, R. Mathewes. 2002
88 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Coastal temperate rainforests from southeast Alaska through to southern Oregon are ecologically distinct from forests of neighboring regions, which have a drier, or more continental, climate and disturbance regimes dominated by fires. The long-term role of fire remains one of the key outstanding sources of uncertainty in the historical dynamics of the wetter and less seasonal forests that dominate the northerly two thirds of the rainforest region in British Columbia and Alaska. Here, we describe the long-term fire regime in two forests on the south coast of British Columbia by means of 244 AMS radiocarbon dates of charcoal buried in forest soils. In both forests, some sites have experienced no fire over the last 6000 years and many other sites have experienced only one or two fires during that time. Intervals between fires vary from a few centuries to several thousand years. In contrast to other conifer forests, this supports a model of forest dynamics where fires are of minor ecological importance. Instead, forest history is dominated by fine-scale processes of disturbance and recovery that maintain an ubiquitous late-successional character over the forest landscape. This has significant implications for ecosystem-based forest management and our understanding of carbon storage in forest soils.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e52c0ac0f2d343c65b745b89a6b64bceb28ae75f
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Citations in the corpus
- An 1800-year record of the spatial and temporal distribution of fire from the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada (2003, methodology): “Areas on north-facing slopes generally have not burned for >1800 years, and in some cases have not burned for over 6000 years (Gavin 2000; Lertzman et al. 2002).”
- Ecosystem management based on natural disturbances: hierarchical context and non-equilibrium paradigm (2011, background): “However, for the ongoing development of ecosystem management (Grumbine 1994; Christensen et al. 1996) or ecosystembased management (Lertzman et al. 2002) concepts, accumulating knowledge on naturally recurring disturbances, which profoundly regulate the function, structure, and dynamics of…”
- The Paradigm of Management, Management Systems, and Resource Stewardship (2009, methodology): “I approach this from the perspective of an applied ecologist with an interest in both the science (e.g., Lertzman et al. 1996a, 2002) and policy (e.g., Lertzman et al. 1996b) contexts of modern resource management and how traditional societies understand and interact with their resources (e.g.,…”
- Documenting ancient plant management in the northwest of North America 1 (2008, background): “2001, 2007), to thousands of years in wet coastal rainforests of the British Columbia coast (Lertzman et al. 2002; Gavin et al. 2003a, 2003b).”