Modelling long-term fire regimes of southern California shrublands

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2011 papers

Abstract

This paper explores the environmental factors that drive the southern California chaparral fire regime. Specifically, we examined the response of three fire regime metrics (fire size distributions, fire return interval maps, cumulative total area burned) to variations in the number of ignitions, the spatial pattern of ignitions, the number of Santa Ana wind events, and live fuel moisture, using the HFire fire spread model. HFire is computationally efficient and capable of simulating the spatiotemporal progression of individual fires on a landscape and aggregating results for fully resolved individual fires over hundreds or thousands of years to predict long-term fire regimes. A quantitative understanding of the long-term drivers of a fire regime is of use in fire management and policy.

Related Papers

• → Fire management in Mediterranean-climate shrublands: a case study from the Cape fynbos, South Africa(2010)172 cited
• → SIMULATING THE EFFECTS OF FREQUENT FIRE ON SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COASTAL SHRUBLANDS(2006)93 cited
• → Influence of short-interval fire occurrence on post-fire recovery of fire-prone shrublands in California, USA(2012)59 cited
• → Response of a shrubland mammal and reptile community to a history of landscape-scale wildfire(2015)30 cited
• → Plant community response to fuel break construction and goat grazing in a southern California shrubland(2021)7 cited