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OOS-37:
Post-fire conversion of forest to non-forest: Do we need new theory?
Wednesday,
August 10, 1:30 PM - 5 PM, Meeting Rooms 511c and 511f, Level 5, Palais
des congrès de Montréal
Organizers:
Randy Balice (balice@lanl.gov),
Bill Romme, Thomas Swetnam
Description:
An
increasing trend of area burned in North America during the past decade, and the
recent occurrence of many very large, high severity fires highlights the need
for discussion, investigation, and synthesis of post-fire vegetative responses
on these landscapes. Fire is a well-known ecological process that has been
characterized as a primary driving force initiating secondary successional
processes in a variety of forest types in North America. However, some
landscapes that have burned during the past 100 years appear to be exhibiting
changes that may not fit well with current post-fire successional models. In
many cases, post-fire succession to assemblages of organisms that resemble
pre-fire communities is a very slow process, or may not happen at all. This
series of papers will examine the roles of land-use history, changing climates,
invasive species, and other potential factors that could lead to extraordinary
post-fire successional processes, and we will address the theoretical
consequences of these processes.
 
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