Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
events are affected by the events that came before. From this framework historians
can develop entire fabrics of understanding about complex and nuanced situations.
Likewise, Geography allows us to examine questions from the starting assumption
that location matters. Understanding what is where, and what is near or far from it
can also help us understand the underlying process at work and hopefully even help
us understand how to better interact with the world, which is the corner-stone of
improving environmental management. Pyrogeography strives to bring exactly this
sort of spatial understanding to wildland fire management and the social planning
necessary for humanity to coexist effectively with this inevitable natural process.
Another central element of Geography is the notion of scale. It is critically neces-
sary that we understand both the temporal and spatial scales of our questions or we
risk misunderstanding the meaning of the answers. For an example at the broadest
global scale, wildland fires interact with our atmosphere releasing huge amounts of
gases and particulates each year. These gasses and particulates affect the climate and
interact with the biosphere changing how and where plants grow, which influences
future wildland fires. Geotechnical tools such as global remote sensing systems have
radically altered our ability to map these processes across many scales. In so doing,
these tools have helped us to develop better regional and even global understanding
of the impacts of fire (Randerson et al.
2006
).
It is the role of Pyrogeography to help us understand these spatial and temporal
patterns and by extension to help elucidate and detangle the underlying processes
that lead to those patterns, as well as help us understand the implications of our
management policies and practices. In this way Pyrogeography goes well beyond
ecology or forestry, both which are not suited for integrating such diversity issues.
Because fire interacts with so many things in so many places, Pyrogeography is also
a continuously expanding enterprise. However, the term tends to refer to wildland
fire issues and associated ecological, climate, fire management, and urban wildland
intermix (WUI) issues. Though urban and structural fire fighting are obviously both
“Pyro” and “Geography” the term has not been extended into these areas. GIS and
Geotechnologies have been proving themselves invaluable in the suppression and
prevention of fire in the urban environment. However, structural fire is not the topic
of this chapter.
3.3 Fire Regimes
To work in wildland fire analysis it is essential to understand the concept of fire
regimes. Fire regimes are also one of the central notions in Pyrogeography. We dif-
ferentiate fire regimes across space because fires in different places are qualitatively
and quantitatively different in both how they burn and what that burning changes
about ecosystems. The concept of fire regimes was introduced by Malcolm Gill in
1975 (Gill
1975
). Any region of the earth with enough vegetation to burn has a
fire regime, and these regimes change over space and time as vegetation and cli-
mate varies. As with many other ecological and land management concepts there is
also debate about the role of humans in the “natural” processes of fire regimes.
