Global change impacts on landscape fires

A major problem in projecting ecological change and understanding its mechanisms is the lack of non-equilibrium dynamics in ecological models. The inclusion of disturbance, especially fire is essential for dynamic vegetation models to simulate transient changes in vegetation composition and structure. Understanding landscape dynamics in relation to fire, and how these dynamics may be altered by climate and land use changes is a priority. The development of fire-vegetation models at landscape scales is a crucial gap in land management. Additionally, understanding human impacts on the fire regime is critical for projecting vegetation change in human-modified landscapes, which now occupy large proportions of the globe. The objective of this working group is to use the current well-developed understanding of fire behavior/fire ecology and fire-weather to develop a set of dynamic fire-climate-vegetation models that simulate fire effects at temporal and spatial scales relevant to vegetation change. We will use a common modelling environment, LAMOS, to conduct this research. LAMOS (a LAndscape Modelling Shell) is an interactive and flexible landscape modelling platform designed to include alternative methods for simulating vegetation response to landscape change. This proposal specifically addresses three questions: 1) How well do different landscape fire models reproduce fire statistics under current climate, both with respect to each other and with respect to fire history records at selected sites, 2) At what spatial and temporal scales does landscape pattern influence the fire regime, and 3) Under which weather conditions are fire patterns sensitive to fuel landscape pattern, and how often under present / future climate is the threshold of sensitivity crossed.