DOCUMENT

Name:   Characterizing Historic and Contemporary Fire Regimes in the Lake States -- Final Report

Date Published:  11/2005

Document Type:  report

Brief Description:  Summary of Project: The overall goal of this project was to contribute to our knowledge of historical and modern fire regimes within northern Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Specific goals were to: (1) synthesize available information on historic fire regimes; (2) map landscape ecosystems of varying susceptibility to disturbance across sixty million acres of forestlands; and (3) document how fire regimes have changed since European settlement.

Complete Description:  Introduction: A number of approaches have been used to characterize historical fire regimes. These include use of dendrochronological techniques to date fire scars (Clements 1910, Heinselman 1973, Arno and Sneck 1977, Simard and Blank 1982, Loope 1991, Brown et al. 2001), use of current age class data fit to a negative exponential curve to calculate fire rotations (Van Wagner 1978), and use of stratigraphic charcoal analysis on petrographic thin sections (Clark 1988a, 1988b). Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages related to assessing adequately fire regimes at relevant spatial and temporal scales (Agee 1993). However, none of these methods could be applied practically across the expansive study area of this research due to data availability requirements. The many challenges associated with characterizing fire regimes include accommodating area effects on estimates of fire return intervals or fire rotations (Arno and Petersen 1983, Johnson and Gutsell 1994), assumptions regarding flammability of fuels and fire behavior across heterogeneous landscapes (Baker 1989, Turner et al. 1989, Gosz 1992, Turner and Romme 1994, Brown et al. 2001), and adequacy of approaches for understanding long term patterns (Clark 1988a, 1988b, 1990). An important initial facet of our research was to reconstruct historical forest fires across the entire study area, and map categories of landscape ecosystems based on associations of ecological factors known to affect fire regimes and the biogeography of forest communities. Area effects on estimates of fire occurrence were addressed by studying fire regimes across a very large study area. Landscape heterogeneity was reduced by networking landscape ecosystems into similar vegetative and edaphic classes, and determining fire rotations within relatively homogeneous units. Long-term patterns were partially addressed by studying fires occurring in the early 1800s, prior to fire suppression, as well as modern fires.

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Characterizing Historic and Contemporary Fire Regimes in the Lake States

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Details ®	Created Date: 11/25/2006 Metadata Creator: Elizabeth Caldwell The Nature Conservancy ecaldwell@tnc.org Type: FRAMES document Metadata Version: 1 Security Information: Schema: http://frames.nbii.gov/metadata/documents/documents.xsd
Keyword(s):	FRAMES subject categories fire history GACC regions Eastern NBII Resource Type Management Plans and Reports none charcoal none dendrochonology
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