Reconstructing Landscape Pattern of Historical Fires and Fire Regimes (Swetnam et al., 2011)

Full Citation: Swetnam, Tyson, et al. "Reconstructing Landscape Pattern of Historical Fires and Fire Regimes." Ecological Studies, 2010, pp. 165-192.

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). When joined with analysis of contemporary fires, the spatial properties of historical fires can provide a valuable perspective for fire and fuel management decisions (Schmidt et al. 2002). For these and other reasons, spatial reconstruction of historical fires is of both scientific and management interest.