Fire and Ice: North Meets South: 2009

Sunday, December 6, 2009

One month to go until I head to the deep south - Stillwater, Oklahoma! It doesn't seem real as I sit here in Fort Nelson with temperatures down to -26C last night and the "land locked tight as a drum" as Robert Service says.

http://fireecology.okstate.edu/patch_burning__pyricherbivory.html

Pyric herbivory: grazing driven by fire (Fuhlendorf, Engle, Kerby and Hamilton - 2009)

"A new focus on the ecological interaction of fire and grazing in which each disturbance is spatially and temporally dependent on the other and results in a landscape where disturbance is best described as a shifting mosaic (a landscape with patches that vary with time since disturbance) that is critical to ecological structure and function of many ecosystems...the spatial and temporal interaction of fire and grazing, where positive and negative feedbacks promote a shifting pattern of disturbance across the landscape... For ecosystems across the globe with a long history of fire and grazing, pyric herbivory with any grazing herbivore is likely more effective at restoring evolutionary disturbance patterns than a focus on restoring any large vertebrate while ignoring the interaction with fire and other disturbances..."