The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth
By D. Bowman, Jennifer K. Balch, P. Artaxo, W. Bond, Mark A. Cochrane, Carla M. D'Antonio, Ruth S. DeFries, F. Johnston, J. E. Keeley, M. Krawchuk and 9 more. Journal of Biogeography, 2011
1,104 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Humans and their ancestors are unique in being a fire‐making species, but ‘natural’ (i.e. independent of humans) fires have an ancient, geological history on Earth. Natural fires have influenced biological evolution and global biogeochemical cycles, making fire integral to the functioning of some biomes. Globally, debate rages about the impact on ecosystems of prehistoric human‐set fires, with views ranging from catastrophic to negligible. Understanding of the diversity of human fire regimes on Earth in the past, present and future remains rudimentary. It remains uncertain how humans have caused a departure from ‘natural’ background levels that vary with climate change. Available evidence shows that modern humans can increase or decrease background levels of natural fire activity by clearing forests, promoting grazing, dispersing plants, altering ignition patterns and actively suppressing fires, thereby causing substantial ecosystem changes and loss of biodiversity. Some of these contemporary fire regimes cause substantial economic disruptions owing to the destruction of infrastructure, degradation of ecosystem services, loss of life, and smoke‐related health effects. These episodic disasters help frame negative public attitudes towards landscape fires, despite the need for burning to sustain some ecosystems. Greenhouse gas‐induced warming and changes in the hydrological cycle may increase the occurrence of large, severe fires, with potentially significant feedbacks to the Earth system. Improved understanding of human fire regimes demands: (1) better data on past and current human influences on fire regimes to enable global comparative analyses, (2) a greater understanding of different cultural traditions of landscape burning and their positive and negative social, economic and ecological effects, and (3) more realistic representations of anthropogenic fire in global vegetation and climate change models. We provide an historical framework to promote understanding of the development and diversification of fire regimes, covering the pre‐human period, human domestication of fire, and the subsequent transition from subsistence agriculture to industrial economies. All of these phases still occur on Earth, providing opportunities for comparative research.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4f4fca059406e752c5630b2fd4f8e432279d55e
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Citations in the corpus
- Rapid growth of the US wildland-urban interface raises wildfire risk (2018, background): “While fires are an integral part of many ecosystems and the Earth system as a whole (6), humans have changed fire regimes globally (7) and throughout the United States (5), and climate change will increase fire frequency in the future, including in the WUI (8).”
- Assessing changes in global fire regimes (2023, background): “…modified vegetation type and density for 77% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, primarily through agriculture, with myriad consequences for fuel characteristics and ignition sources (Balch et al., 2017a; Bowman et al., 2011; Marlon et al., 2008; Słowiński et al., 2022; Watson et al., 2018).”
- Island extinctions: processes, patterns, and potential for ecosystem restoration (2017, neutral): “This may have been to clear forest for swidden agriculture (e.g. Weisler 1995; Bowman et al. 2011; Wilmshurst et al. 2014), improving access to resources (McGlone et al. 2005) or even for hunting.”
- The spatially varying influence of humans on fire probability in North America (2016, background): “…was the high anthropogenic impact of the Midwest (hex4, hex8), Great Plains (hex5, hex9), and Gulf of Mexico (hex2, hex4), areas that have undergone widespread land conversions and that are at a more advanced stage of anthropogenic fire-regime transformation (Guyette et al 2002, Bowman et al 2011).”
- Defining pyromes and global syndromes of fire regimes (2013, background): “The prevalence and ubiquity of the ICS pyrome suggest that this is a human-derived pyrome (41).”
- Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States (2017, background): “Humans primarily alter fire regimes in three ways: changing the distribution and density of ignitions, shifting the seasonality of burning, or altering available fuels (2, 3).”
- People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years (2021, background): “While this paradigm has increasingly been questioned with respect to long-term global changes in climate (19), fire regimes (20), and biodiversity (7, 8, 21), it continues to have real-world consequences, including failed policies of fire suppression, wildlife management, and ecological restoration,”
- Revisiting the pyrodiversity–biodiversity hypothesis: long-term fire regimes and the structure of ant communities in a Neotropical savanna hotspot (2014, background): “Anthropogenic changes in natural fire regimes, nonetheless, are a world-wide phenomenon, impacting fire-prone ecosystems and challenging their conservation (Bowman et al. 2011).”
- Ecology and long-term history of fire in New Zealand. (2014, background): “They are so recent that they have occurred in the absence of major climate shifts, making New Zealand an ideal setting in which to explore human–fire interactions (Bowman et al. 2011; McWethy et al. 2013).”
- Biological and geophysical feedbacks with fire in the Earth system (2018, background): “Human impacts on global climate, atmospheric properties, and vegetation distributions also feed back to alter fire regimes (Bowman et al 2011, Cochrane and Barber 2009).”