Don McKenzie (US Forest Service)
Abstract. Wildfire is nearly ubiquitous on landscapes of the western U.S., and in many other regions around the world. There are theoretical and practical reasons to understand fire’s influence, both in the short term (individual fires) and long term (fire “regimes” and how they affect landscape pattern and process). Landscape ecology is the branch of ecological science most explicitly tied to Euclidean space; in contrast to ecosystems, biomes, communities, and even populations, landscapes are entirely tangible. The “landscape criterion” (1) views the science of ecology from this perspective.
In this talk, I ask whether the landscape ecology of fire can draw on complex-systems science to answer some of its difficult questions. These answers could inform natural resource management and policy and wider societal concerns such as public health and safety. Possible links to complex-systems science include understanding cross-scale patterns, including mathematical relationships such as power laws (2,3), and phase transitions and domains of criticality analogous to those found in physical systems (4). On the other hand, it can be a stretch to identify landscape fire with some components often associated with complex systems, such as self-organization and emergence. I propose, very tentatively, the idea of “landscape memory” as an indicator of complexity, and the balance of exogenous and endogenous controls as an indicator of landscape resilience to climate change and extreme events such as the Las Conchas Fire in 2011. I welcome constructive challenges to all these ideas from the multi-disciplinary SFI community.
(1) Allen, T.F.H., and and T.W. Hoekstra. 1992. Toward a unified ecology. New York: Columbia University Press.
(2) Falk, D.A., C. Miller, D. McKenzie, and A.E. Black. 2007. Cross-scale analysis of fire regimes. Ecosystems 10:809-823.
(3) McKenzie, D., C. Miller, and D.A. Falk, eds. 2011. The Landscape Ecology of Fire. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Springer Ltd.
(4) McKenzie, D., and M.C. Kennedy. 2012. Power laws reveal phase transitions in landscape controls of fire regimes. Nature Commnications doi: 10.1038/ncomms1731.