Fire and the ecology of a changing world

Abstract

Most of this book has dealt with fire effects at the scale of populations and communities, with some consideration of landscape-level effects. In this chapter, we look at the large-scale impact of fire on global vegetation and the evolution of floras. We pose the hypothetical questions of what the vegetation of the world might look like in the absence of fire and how the inclusion of fire might alter systems which now seldom burn. Would there be radical changes in structure? Would grasslands be replaced by forests without burning, or forests become grasslands as fires intrude? We develop the chapter in the context of two key social concerns that drive an enormous amount of contemporary research effort: global climate change attributed to human impacts on global atmospheric chemistry and the imminent threat of extinction of much of the world’s biological diversity. They provide a useful framework for discussing the contributions and the shortcomings of our current ecological understanding in general and of fire ecology in particular.