Abstract
Analysis of historical fire patterns of severity provides a view of fire regimes before they were altered by contemporary forest management practices such as logging, road-building, grazing, and fire suppression. Historical fire data can place contemporary observed fire data in a longer temporal context, and establish prior likelihoods to test outputs from predictive fire behavior and forest vegetation simulation models. When integrated with biophysical and remote-sensing data, fire-history data have been modeled to create both coarse scale (1 km2, Schmidt et al. 2002) and fine scale (30 m2, Rollins and Frame 2006) maps of fire regimes for the contiguous United States (LANDFIRE 2007).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Agee, J.K. 1998. The landscape ecology of western forest fire regimes. Northwest Science 72: 24–34.
Agee, J.K., and C.N. Skinner. 2005. Basic principles of forest fuel reduction treatments. Forest Ecology and Management 211: 83–96.
Altman, D.G., and J.M. Bland. 1995. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. British Medical Journal 311: 485.
Baisan, C.H., and T.W. Swetnam. 1990. Fire history on a desert mountain range: Rincon Mountain Wilderness, Arizona, USA. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 20: 1559–1569.
Barton, A.M. 1999. Pines versus oaks: Effects of fire on the composition of Madrean forests in Arizona. Forest Ecology and Management 120: 143–156.
Beaty, R.M., and A.H. Taylor. 2001. Spatial and temporal variation of fire regimes in a mixed conifer forest landscape, southern Cascades, California, USA. Journal of Biogeography 28:955–966.
Beeson, P.C., S.N. Martens, and D.D. Breshears. 2001. Simulating overland flow following wildfire: Mapping vulnerability to landscape disturbance. Hydrological Processes 15: 2917–2930.
Bonnet, V.H., A.W. Schoettle, and W.D. Shepperd. 2005. Postfire environmental conditions influence the spatial pattern of regeneration for Pinus ponderosa. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 35: 37–47.
Brown, J.K., and J.K. Smith, eds. 2000. Wildland fire in ecosystems: Effects of fire on flora. General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-42-2. Ft. Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
Brown, P.M., M.W. Kaye, L.S. Huckaby, and C.H. Baisan. 2001. Fire history along environmental gradients in the Sacramento Mountains, New Mexico: Influences of local patterns and regional processes. Ecoscience 8: 115–126.
Brown, P.M., E.K. Heyerdahl, S.G. Kitchen, and M.H. Weber. 2008a. Climate effects on historical fires (1630–1900) in Utah. International Journal of Wildland Fire 17: 28–39.
Brown, P.M., C.L. Wienk, and A.J. Symstad. 2008b. Fire and forest history at Mount Rushmore. Ecological Applications 18: 1984–1999.
Burrough, P.A., and R.A. McDonnell. 1998. Principles of geographical information systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cocke, A.E., P.Z. Fule, and J.E. Crouse. 2005. Comparison of burn severity assessments using differenced normalized burn ratio and ground data. International Journal of Wildland Fire 14: 189–198.
Collins, B.M., and S.L. Stephens. 2008. Managing natural wildfires in Sierra Nevada wilderness areas. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5: 523–527.
Collins, B.M., J.D. Miller, A.E. Thode, M. Kelly, J.W. van Wagtendonk, and S.L. Stephens. 2009. Interactions among wildland fires in a long-established Sierra Nevada natural fire area. Ecosystems 12: 114–128.
Connell, J.H., and R.O. Slatyer. 1977. Mechanisms of succession in natural communities and their role in community stability and organization. The American Naturalist 111: 1119–1144.
Dieterich, J.H. 1980. The composite fire interval–a tool for more accurate interpretation of fire history. In Proceedings of the fire history workshop, eds. M. Stokes and J. Dieterich, 8–14. General Technical Report RM-81. Ft. Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
Dieterich, J.H., and T.W. Swetnam. 1984. Dendrochronology of a fire-scarred ponderosa pine. Forest Science 30: 238–247.
de Mestre, N.J., E.A. Catchpole, D.H. Anderson, and R.C. Rothermel. 1989. Uniform propagation of a planar fire front without wind. Combustion Science Technology 65: 231–244.
Duarte, J.A.M.S. 1997. Fire spread in natural fuel—computational aspects. In: D. Stauffer, Editor, Annual Reviews of Computational Physics, World Scientific, Singapore.
Eidenshink, J., B. Schwind, K. Brewer, Z. Zhu, B. Quayle, and S. Howard. 2007. A project for monitoring trends in burn severity. Fire Ecology 3: 3–21.
ESRI. 2008. ArcMap 9.3. ESRI, Redlands.
Everett, R., J. Townsley, and D. Baumgartner. 2000. Inherent disturbance regimes: A reference for evaluating the long-term maintenance of ecosystems. In Mapping wildfire hazards and risks, eds. R.N. Sampson, R.D. Atkinson, and J.W. Lewis, 265–288. New York: Food Products Press/Haworth Press.
Fall, J.G. 1998. Reconstructing the historical frequency of fire: A modeling approach to developing and testing methods. M.S. thesis, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby.
Falk, D.A. 2004. Scaling rules for fire regimes. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona Tucson.
Falk, D.A., and T.W. Swetnam. 2003. Scaling rules and probability models for surface fire regimes in Ponderosa pine forests. In Fire, fuel treatments, and ecological restoration, Proceedings RMRS-P-29. eds. P.N. Omi and L.A. Joyce, 301–317. Fort Collins: U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station.
Falk, D.A., C. Miller, D. McKenzie, and A.E. Black. 2007. Cross-scale analysis of fire regimes. Ecosystems 10: 809–826.
Falk, D.A., C. Cox, D. Hill, T. McKinnon, E. Rosenberg, K. Siderits, and T.W. Swetnam. 2010. Living with fire: Land-use planning for forest health and safe communities. Technical Report of the Arizona Forest Health Advisory Council, Office of the Governor.
Farris, C.A., C.H. Baisan, D.A. Falk, S.R. Yool, and T.W. Swetnam. 2010. Spatial and temporal corroboration of a fire-scar fire history reconstruction in a frequently burned ponderosa pine forest in Arizona. Ecological Applications 20: 1598–1614.
Fielding, A.H., and J.F. Bell. 1997. A review of methods for the assessment of prediction errors in conservation presence/absence models. Environmental Conservation 24: 38–49.
Finney, M.A. 1999. Mechanistic modeling of landscape fire patterns. In Spatial modeling of forest landscape change, eds. D.J. Mladenoff and W.L. Baker, 186–209. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Finney, M.A., C.W. McHugh, and I.C. Grenfell. 2005. Stand- and landscape-level effects of prescribed burning on two Arizona wildfires. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 35: 1714–1722.
Fritts, H.C. 1976. Tree rings and climate. London: Academic.
Fritts, H.C., and T.W. Swetnam. 1989. Dendroecology: A tool for evaluating variations in past and present forest management. Advances in Ecological Research 19: 111–189.
Grissino-Mayer, H.D., and T.W. Swetnam. 2000. Century-scale climate forcing of fire regimes in the American Southwest. Holocene 10: 213–220.
Grissino-Mayer, H.D., C.H. Baisan, and T.W. Swetnam 1996. Fire history in the Pinaleño Mountains of southeastern Arizona: Effects of human-related disturbances. In Biodiversity and management of the Madrean Archipelago: The sky islands of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, eds. L.B. DeBano and G.G. Gottfried, 399–407. General Technical Report RM-GTR-264. Ft. Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
Gutsell, S.L., and E.A. Johnson. 1996. How fire scars are formed: Coupling a disturbance process to its ecological effect. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 26: 166–174.
Heinselman, M.L. 1973. Fire in the virgin forests of the boundary waters canoe area, Minnesota. Quaternary Research 3: 329–382.
Hessl, A.E., D. McKenzie, and R. Schellhaas. 2004. Drought and Pacific decadal oscillation linked to fire occurrence in the inland Pacific Northwest. Ecological Applications 14: 425–442.
Hessl, A.E., J. Miller, J. Kernan, D. Keenum, and D. McKenzie. 2007. Mapping paleo-fire boundaries from binary point data: comparing interpolation methods. Professional Geographer 59: 87–104.
Heyerdahl, E.K., L.B. Brubaker, and J.K. Agee. 2001. Spatial controls of historical fire regimes: A multiscale example from the interior West USA. Ecology 82: 660–678.
Iniguez, J.M., T.W. Swetnam, and S.R. Yool. 2008. Topography affected landscape fire history patterns in southern Arizona, USA. Forest Ecology and Management 256:295–303.
Isaaks, E.H., and R.M. Srivastava. 1989. Applied geostatistics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, E.A. 1992. Fire and vegetation dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, E.A., and K. Miyanishi, eds. 2001. Forest fires: Behavior and ecological effects. San Diego: Academic.
Johnson, E.A., and D.R. Wowchuck. 1993. Wildfires in the southern Canadian Rocky Mountains and their relationship to mid-tropospheric anomalies. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 2: 1213–1222.
Kaib, J.M. 1998. Fire history in riparian canyon pine-oak forests and the intervening desert grasslands of the southwest borderlands: a dendroecological, historical, and cultural inquiry. M.S. thesis, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Kaib, M., C.H. Baisan, H.D. Grissino-Mayer, and T.W. Swetnam 1996. Fire history in the gallery pine-oak forests and adjacent grasslands of the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. In Effects of fire on Madrean Province ecosystems. General Technical Report RM-GTR-289. eds. P. F. Ffolliott, L. F. DeBano, and M. B. Baker et al., 253–264. Fort Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
Keane, R.E., R. Burgan, and J. van Wagtendonk. 2001. Mapping wildland fuels for fire management across multiple scales: Integrating remote sensing, GIS and biophysical modeling. International Journal of Wildland Fire 10: 301–319.
Kellogg, L.-K.B., D. McKenzie, D.L. Peterson, and A.E. Hessl. 2008. Spatial models for inferring topographic controls on low-severity fire in the eastern Cascade Range of Washington, USA. Landscape Ecology 23: 227–240.
Kotliar, N.B., S.L. Haire, and C.H. Key. 2003. Lessons from the fires of 2000: post-fire heterogeneity in ponderosa pine forests.” In Fire, fuel treatments, and ecological restoration: Conference proceedings. Proceedings RMRS-P-29. 2002 16–18 April., eds. P.N. Omi and L.A. Joyce, 277–280. Fort Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
Krawchuk, M.A., M.A. Moritz, M.-A. Parisien, J. Van Dorn, and K. Hayhoe. 2009. Global pyrogeography: The current and future distribution of wildfire. PLoS ONE 4(4): e5102.
Kulakowski, D., and T.T. Veblen. 2007. Effect of prior disturbances on the extent and severity of wildfire in Colorado subalpine forests. Ecology 88(3): 759–769.
LANDFIRE. 2007. Homepage of the LANDFIRE Project, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service; U.S. Department of Interior. Available: http://www.landfire.gov/index.php. Accessed 26 Feb 2010.
Lentile, L.B., Z.A. Holden, A.M.S. Smith, M.J. Falkowski, A.T. Hudak, P. Morgan, S.A. Lewis, P.E. Gessler, and N.C. Benson. 2006. Remote sensing techniques to assess active fire characteristics and post-fire effects. International Journal of Wildland Fire 15: 319–345.
Manel, S., H.C. Williams, and S.J. Ormerod. 2001. Evaluating presence-absence models in ecology: The need to account for prevalence. Journal of Applied Ecology 38: 921–931.
Margolis, E.Q., and J.B. Balmat. 2009. Fire history and fire-climate relationships along a fire regime gradient in the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed, NM, USA. Forest Ecology and Management 258: 2416–2430.
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.
McKenzie, D., S.J. Prichard, A.E. Hessl, and D.L. Peterson. 2004. Empirical approaches to modeling wildland fire in the Pacific Northwest, USA: Methods and applications to landscape simulations. In Emulating natural forest landscape disturbances: Concepts and applications, eds. A.J. Perera, L.J. Buse, and M.G. Weber. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapter 7.
McKenzie, D., A.E. Hessl, and L.-K.B. Kellogg. 2006. Using neutral models to identify constraints on low-severity fire regimes. Landscape Ecology 21: 139–152.
Miller, C., and D.L. Urban. 2000. Connectivity of forest fuels and surface fire regimes. Landscape Ecology 15: 145–154.
Miller, J.D., and S.R. Yool. 2002. Mapping forest post-fire canopy consumption in several overstory types using multi-temporal Landsat TM and ETM data. Remote Sensing of Environment 82: 481–496.
Minnich, R. A., and R. J. Dezzani. 1991. Suppression, fire behavior, and fire magnitudes in Californian chaparral at the urban/wildland interface. Pages 67 – 83 in J. J.DeVries, editor. California watersheds at the urban interface. Report 75. University of California, Water Resources Center, Davis.
Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS). 2010. Available: http://www.mtbs.gov. Accessed 27 Aug 2010.
Morgan, P., G. Aplet, J. Haufler, H. Humphries, M. Moore, and W. Wilson. 1994. Historical range of variability: A useful tool for evaluating ecosystem change. Journal of Sustainable Forestry 8: 87–112.
Morgan, P., C. Hardy, T.W. Swetnam, M.G. Rollins, and D.G. Long. 2001. Mapping fire regimes across time and space: Understanding coarse and fine-scale patterns. International Journal of Wildland Fire 10: 329–342.
Moritz, M.A. 2003. Spatiotemporal analysis of controls on shrubland fire regimes: Age dependency and fire hazard. Ecology 84: 351–361.
Morrison, P.H., and F.J. Swanson. 1990. Fire history and pattern in a Cascade Range landscape. General Technical Report PNW-GTR-254. Portland: U.S. Forest Service.
Okabe, A., B. Boots, and K. Sugihara. 1992. Spatial tessellations concepts and applications of Voronoi diagrams. New York: Wiley.
Parsons, R.A., E.K. Heyerdahl, R.E. Keane, B. Dorner, and J. Fall. 2007. Assessing accuracy of point fire intervals across landscapes with simulation modeling. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 37: 1605–1614.
Peterson, G.D. 2002. Contagious disturbance, ecological memory, and the emergence of landscape pattern. Ecosystems 5: 329–338.
Pyne, S.J. 2001. Fire: A brief history. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Rollins, MG. and C.K. Frame, tech. eds. 2006. The LANDFIRE prototype project: Nationally consistent and locally relevant geospatial data for wildland fire management. General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-175. Fort Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
Rollins, M.G., T.W. Swetnam, and P. Morgan. 2001. Evaluating a century of fire patterns in two Rocky Mountain wilderness areas using digital fire atlases. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 31: 2107–2123.
Romme, W.H., and D. Despain. 1982. Fire and landscape diversity in subalpine forests of Yellowstone National Park. Ecological Monographs 52: 199–221.
Rothermel, R. 1972. A mathematical model for predicting fire spread in wildland fuels. Research Paper INT-115. Ogden: U.S. Forest Service.
Ryan, K.C., and E.D. Reinhardt. 1988. Predicting postfire mortality of seven western conifers. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 18: 1291–1297.
Savage, M., and J.N. Mast. 2005. How resilient are southwestern ponderosa pine forests after crown fires? Canadian Journal of Forest Research 35: 967–977.
Schmidt, K.M., Menakis, J.P., Hardy, C.C., Hann, W.J., and D.L. Bunnell, 2002. Development of coarse-scale spatial data for wildland fire and fuel management. General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-87. Fort Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
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.
Scholl, A.E., and A.H. Taylor. 2010. Fire regimes, forest change, and self-organization in an old-growth mixed-conifer forest, Yosemite National Park, USA. Ecological Applications 20: 362–3809.
Schweingruber, F.H. 1988. Tree rings: Basics and applications of dendrochronology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Shapiro-Miller, L.B., E.K. Heyerdahl, and P. Morgan. 2007. Comparison of fire scars, fire atlases, and satellite data in the northwestern United States. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 37: 1933–1943.
Stokes, M.A., and T.L. Smiley. 1968. An introduction to tree-ring dating. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Swetnam, T.W., and C.H. Baisan. 1996. Historical fire regime patterns in the southwestern United States since AD 1700. In Fire effects in southwestern forests: The second La Mesa fire symposium. General Technical Report RM-GTR-286. ed. C. D. Allen, 11–32. Fort Collins: U.S. Forest Service.
Swetnam, T.W., and J.L. Betancourt. 1992. Temporal patterns of El Nino/Southern Oscillation – Wildfire teleconnections in the southwestern United States. In El Nino: Historical and paleoclimatic aspects of the Southern Oscillation, eds. H.F. Diaz and V. Markgraf, 259–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swetnam, T.W., C.D. Allen, and J.L. Betancourt. 1999. Applied historical ecology: Using the past to manage the future. Ecological Applications 9: 1189–1206.
Taylor, A.H. 2000. Climatic influences on fire regimes in the Lake Tahoe Basin, California and Nevada. In Fire conference 2000: National congress on fire ecology, prevention, and management, eds. K.E.M. Galley and T.P. Wilson. Tallahassee: Tall Timbers Research Station.
Taylor, A.H., and C.N. Skinner. 2003. Spatial patterns and controls on historical fire regimes and forest structure in the Klamath Mountains. Ecological Applications 13: 704–719.
Tobler, W. 1970. A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region. Economic Geography 46(2): 234–240.
Turner, M.G., W.L. Baker, C.J. Peterson, and R.K. Peet. 1998. Factors influencing succession: Lessons from large, infrequent natural disturbances. Ecosystems 1: 511–523.
Turner, M.G., W.H. Romme, and D.B. Tinker. 2003. Surprises and lessons from the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1: 351–358.
Van Horne, M.L., and P.Z. Fulé. 2006. Comparing methods of reconstructing fire history using fire scars in a southwestern United States ponderosa pine forest. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 36: 855–867.
Vines, R.G. 1968. Heat transfer through bark and the resistance of trees to fire. Australian Journal of Botany 16: 499–514.
Watson, D.F. 1981. Computing the n-dimensional tessellation with application to Voronoi polytopes. The Computer Journal 2: 167–172.
Westerling, A.L., H.G. Hidalgo, D.R. Cayan, and T.W. Swetnam. 2006. Warming and earlier spring increase western U.S. forest wildfire activity. Science 313: 940–943.
White, J.D., K.C. Ryan, C.C. Key, and S.W. Running. 1996. Remote sensing of forest fire severity and vegetation recovery. International Journal of Wildland Fire 6: 125–136.
Wondzell, S.M., and J.G. King. 2003. Postfire erosional processes in the Pacific Northwest Rocky Mountain regions. Forest Ecology and Management 178: 75–87.
Wong, C.M., H. Sandmann, B. Dorner. 2003. Historical variability of natural disturbances in British Columbia: A literature review. Kamloops: FORREX-Forest Research Extension Partnership FORREX Series 12.
Zar, J.H. 1984. Biostatistical analysis. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Swetnam, T., Falk, D.A., Hessl, A.E., Farris, C. (2011). Reconstructing Landscape Pattern of Historical Fires and Fire Regimes. In: McKenzie, D., Miller, C., Falk, D. (eds) The Landscape Ecology of Fire. Ecological Studies, vol 213. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0301-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0301-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-0300-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-0301-8
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)