Changes in fire severity across gradients of climate, fire size, and topography: A landscape ecological perspective

Fire Ecology

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 86-103

  Haire, Sandra L ^a   McGarigal, Kevin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS   (United States)

Author keywords

Arizona; Climate change; Fire severity; Forest fire ecology; Generalized Additive Models; New Mexico; Ponderosa pine; Southwestern USA; Spatial pattern metrics; Topographic gradients

Indexed keywords

CLIMATE CHANGE; EL NINO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION; FOREST ECOSYSTEM; FOREST FIRE; LA NINA; LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY; SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY;

ARIZONA; NEW MEXICO; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 70449558778     PISSN: None     EISSN: 19339747     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.4996/fireecology.0502086     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Baker, W.L. 2003. Fires and climate in forested landscapes of the US Rocky Mountains. Pages 120-157 in: T.T. Veblen, W.L. Baker, G. Montenegro, and T. Swetnam, editors. Fire and climatic change in temperate ecosystems of the western Americas. Springer-Verlag, New York, USA.
2. Cary, G.J., R.E. Keane, R.H. Gardner, S. Lavoral, M.D. Flannigan, I.D. Davies, L. Chao, J.M. Lenihan, S. Ruppt, and F. Mouillot. 2006. Comparison of the sensitivity of landscape-fire succession models to variation in terrain, fuel pattern, climate and weather. Landscape Ecology 21: 121-137.
3. Clark, J.S., and Y. Ji. 1995. Fecundity and dispersal in plant-populations-implications for structure and diversity. American Naturalist 146: 72-111.
4. Collins, B.M., M. Kelly, J.W. van Wagtendonk, and S.L. Stephens. 2007. Spatial patterns of large natural fires in Sierra Nevada wilderness areas. Landscape Ecology 22: 545-557.
5. Coop, J.D., and A.W. Schoettle. 2009. Regeneration of Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata) and limber pine (Pinus flexilis) three decades after stand replacing fires. Forest Ecology and Management 257: 893-903.
6. De'ath, G., and K.E. Fabricius. 2000. Classification and regression trees: a powerful yet simple technique for the analysis of complex ecological data. Ecology 81: 3178-3192.
7. Fire Fighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. 2006. Scorched earth tactics: backfires and burnouts. . Accessed 27 January 2009.
8. Flannigan, M.D., and B.M. Wotton. 2001. Climate, weather, and area burned. Pages 351-373 in: E.A. Johnson and K. Miyanishi, editors. Forest fires: behavior and ecological effects. Academic Press, San Diego, California, USA.
9. Foxx, T.S. 1984. Description of La Mesa Fire. Pages 1-10 in: T.S. Foxx, editor. La Mesa Fire Symposium. Los Alamos National Laboratory Report, LA-9236-NERP, New Mexico, USA.
10. Fulé, P.Z., and D.C. Laughlin. 2007. Wildland fire effects on forest structure over an altitudinal gradient, Grand Canyon National Park, USA. Journal of Applied Ecology 44: 136-146.
11. Grissino-Mayer, H.D., and T.W. Swetnam. 2000. Century-scale climate forcing of fire regimes in the American southwest. Holocene 10: 213-220.
12. Guisan, A., T.C. Edwards, Jr., and T. Hastie.2002. Generalized linear and generalized additive models in studies of species distributions: setting the scene. Ecological Modelling 157: 89-100.
13. Haire, S.L., and K. McGarigal. 2008. Inhabitants of landscape scars: succession of woody plants after large, severe forest fires in Arizona and New Mexico. The Southwestern Naturalist 53: 146-161.
14. Kellogg, L.K.B., D. McKenzie, D.L. Peterson, and A.E. Hessl. 2008. Spatial models for inferring topographic controls on historical low-severity fire in the eastern Cascade Range of Washington, USA. Landscape Ecology 23: 227-240.
15. Key, C.H.2006. Ecological and sampling constraints on defining landscape fire severity. Fire Ecology 2(2): 34-59.
16. Key, C.H., and N.C. Benson. 2005. Landscape assessment: ground measure of severity, the Composite Burn Index, and remote sensing of severity, the Normalized Burn Ratio. In FIRE-MON: Fire Effects Monitoring and Inventory System. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-164-CD:LA1-51. . Accessed 27 January 2009.
17. Kotliar, N.B., E.W. Reynolds, and D.H. Deutschman. 2008. American three-toed woodpecker response to burn severity and prey availability at multiple spatial scales. Fire Ecology 4(2): 26-45.
18. Littell, J.S., D. McKenzie, D.L. Peterson, and A.L. Westerling. In press. Climatic influences on twentieth-century area burned in ecoprovinces of the western US. Ecological Applications.
19. Lutz, J.A., J.W. van Wagtendonk, A.E. Thode, J.D. Miller, and J.F. Franklin. 2009. Climate, lightning ignitions, and fire severity in Yosemite National Park, California, USA. International Journal of Wildland Fire 18(6): in press.
20. Margolis, E.Q., T.W. Swetnam, and C.D. Allen. 2007. A stand-replacing fire history in upper montane forests of the southern Rocky Mountains. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 37: 2227-2241.
21. McGarigal, K., S.A. Cushman, M.C. Neel, and E. Ene. 2002. FRAGSTATS: Spatial pattern analysis program for categorical maps. University of Massachusetts, Amherst. . Accessed 27 January 2009.
22. Miller, C., M.-A. Parisien, A.A. Ager, and M.A. Finney. 2008. Evaluating spatially-explicit burn probabilities for strategic fire management planning. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment 119: 245-252.
23. Moody, J.A., D.A. Martin, S.L. Haire, and D.A. Kinner. 2007. Linking runoff response to burn severity after a wildfire. Hydrological Processes 22: 2063-2074.
24. National Park Service-US Geological Survey 2007. National Burn Severity Mapping Project. . Accessed 27 January 2009.
25. National Park Service.2003. Poplar fire. . Accessed 15 November 2008.
26. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.1998. National weather service. . Accessed 15 November 2008.
27. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.2009. Climate indices.. Accessed 30 June 2008.
28. Peterson, D.W., and D.L. Peterson. 2001. Mountain hemlock growth responds to climatic variability at annual and decadal time scales. Ecology 82: 3330-3345.
29. Pickett, S.T.A., V.T. Parker, and P. Fielder. 1992. The new paradigm in ecology: implications for conservation biology above the species level. Pages 65-88 in: P. Fielder and S. Jain, editors. Conservation biology: the theory and practice of nature conservation. Chapman and Hall, New York, New York, USA.
30. Roberts, S.L., J.W. van Wagtendonk, A.K. Miles, D.A. Kelt, and J.A. Lutz. 2008. Modeling the effects of fire severity and spatial complexity on small mammals in Yosemite National Park, California. Fire Ecology 4(2): 83-104.
31. Romme, W.H., E.H. Everham, L.E. Frelich, M.A. Moritz, and R.E. Sparks. 1998. Are large, in-frequent disturbances qualitatively different from small, frequent disturbances? Ecosystems 1: 524-534.
32. Rothermel, R.C. 1983. How to predict the spread and intensity of forest and range fires. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report INT-143. Ogden, Utah, USA.
33. Schoennagel, T., T.T. Veblen, and W.H. Romme. 2004. The interaction of fire, fuels, and climate across Rocky Mountain forests. Bioscience 54: 661-676.
34. Sonderegger, D.L., H. Wang, W.H. Clements, and B.R. Noon. 2009. Using SiZer to detect thresholds in ecological data. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 7(4): 190-195.
35. Stambaugh, M.C., and R.P. Guyette. 2008. Predicting spatio-temporal variability in fire return intervals using a topographic roughness index. Forest Ecology and Management 254: 463-473.
36. Swetnam, T.W., and J.L. Betancourt. 1998. Mesoscale disturbance and ecological response to decadal climatic variability in the American southwest. Journal of Climate 11: 3128-3147.
37. Turner, M.G., R.H. Gardner, and R.V. O'Neill. 2001. Landscape ecology in theory and practice. Springer-Verlag, New York, New York, USA.
38. Turner, M.G., and W.H. Romme.1994. Landscape dynamics in crown fire ecosystems. Landscape Ecology 9: 59-77.
39. US Geological Survey. 1999. National elevation dataset. . Accessed 27 January 2009.
40. van Wagtendonk, J.W., and J.A. Lutz. 2007. Fire regime attributes of wildland fires in Yosemite National Park, USA. Fire Ecology 3(2): 34-52.
41. Wallington T.J., R.J. Hobbs, and S.A. Moore. 2005. Implications of current ecological thinking for biodiversity conservation: a review of the salient issues. Ecology and Society 10. . Accessed 15 November 2008.
42. Westerling, AL., H.G. Hidalgo, D.R. Cayan, and T.W. Swetnam. 2006. Warming and earlier spring increase western US forest wildfire activity. Science 313: 940-943.
43. White, P.S., and S.T.A. Pickett. 1985. Natural disturbance and patch dynamics: an introduction. Pages 3-13 in: S.T.A. Pickett and P.S. White, editors. The ecology of natural disturbance and patch dynamics. Academic Press, New York, New York, USA.
44. Whitlock, C. 2004. Forests, fires and climate. Nature 432: 28-29.
45. Wolter, K., and M.S. Timlin.1998. Measuring the strength of ENSO events: how does 1997/98 rank? Weather 53: 315-324.
46. Wood, S.N.2006. Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. Chapman and Hall, Boca Raton, Florida, USA.
47. Yang J., H.S. He and S.R. Shifley. 2008. Spatial controls of occurrence and spread of wildfires in the Missouri Ozark Highlands. Ecological Applications 18(5): 1212-1225.