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Forest Service , Southern Research Station Fire in Southern Forest Landscapes
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Stanturf, John Wade, Dale D. Waldrop, Thomas A. Kennard, Deborah Achtemeier, Gary L. |
| Abstract | Other than land clearing for urban development (Wear and others 1998), no disturbance is more common in southern forests than fire. The pervasive role of fire predates human activity in the South (Komarek 1964, 1974), and humans magnified that role. Repeating patterns of fire behavior lead to recognizable fire regimes, with temporal and spatial dimensions. Understanding these fire regimes is essential to examining the importance of fire in southern landscapes and integrating fire into forest management. This chapter has six sections: 1. Fire regimes and fire types 2. Fire history in the South 3. Fire regimes of southern forests 4. Prescribed fire 5. Smoke management 6. Restoring fire into southern ecosystems Fire Regimes and Fire-Types Fire Regimes Fire regime refers to the long-term nature of fire in an ecosystem (Brown 2000), including both frequency and severity of effects. The interval between fires in southern forests may be as short as a year or as long as centuries. The intensity of fire and severity of effects can vary in scale from benign to catastrophic. Because of the spatial and temporal variability of fire and its effects, descriptions of fire regimes are broad (Whelan 1995). The fire regimes used in this chapter follow the descriptions used in Brown and Smith (2000). They include the understory, mixed, and stand replacement fire regimes. Fires in the understory fire regime generally do not kill the dominant vegetation or substantially change its structure. Approximately 80 percent or more of the aboveground dominant vegetation survives fire (Brown 2000). The understory fire regime occurs primarily in southern pine and oak-hickory forests, which support pine and pine-oak associations such as Kuchlers southern mixed forest, oak-hickory-pine, and oak-hickory associations. The severity of fire in the mixed fire regime either causes selective mortality in dominant vegetation, depending on tree species' susceptibility to fire, or varies between understory and stand replacement (Brown 2000). The mixed fire regime best represents the resettlement fire history for several hardwood-and conifer-dominated ecosystems. The conifers include pitch pine and Virginia pine of Kuchlers oak-pine association (Kuchler 1964) and pond pine, a dominant tree of the pocosin association. The conifer types fit the mixed fire regime because fire intensities are generally greater than in the understory fire regime and cause mortality ranging from 20 to 80 percent of the overstory. The hard-wood ecosystems include mesophytic hardwood, northern hardwood, and elm-ash-cottonwood forest types. Although the hardwoods are prone to … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/ja_stanturf010.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.srs.fs.fed.us/pubs/ja/ja_stanturf010.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/ja_stanturf010.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
