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Fire regime on a cultural landscape: Navajo Nation.

ABSTRACT: Fire has played an important role in the evolutionary environment of global ecosystems, and Indigenous peoples have long managed natural resources in these fire-prone environments. We worked with the Navajo Nation Forestry Department to evaluate the historical role of fire on a 50 km2 landscape bisected by a natural mountain pass. We used fifty 5-ha circular plots to collect proxy fire history data on fire-scarred trees, stumps, logs, and snags in a coniferous forest centered on a key mountain pass. The fire history data were categorized into three groups: All (all 50 plots), Corridor (25 plots closest to Buffalo Pass drainage), and Outer (remaining 25 plots, farther from pass). We assessed spatial and temporal patterns of fire recurrence and fire-climate relationships. The landscape experienced frequent fires from 1644, the earliest fire date with sufficient sample depth, to 1920, after which fire occurrence was interrupted. The mean fire interval (MFI) for fire dates scarring 10% or more of the samples was 6.25 years; there were 13 large-scale fires identified with the 25% filter with an MFI of 22.6 years. Fire regimes varied over the landscape, with an early reduction in fire occurrence after 1829, likely associated with pastoralism, in the outer uplands away from the pass. In contrast, the pass corridor had continuing fire occurrence until the early 20th century.Synthesis. Fires were synchronized with large-scale top-down climatic oscillations (drought and La Niña), but the spatially explicit landscape sampling design allowed us to detect bottom-up factors of topography, livestock grazing, and human movement patterns that interacted in complex ways to influence the fire regime at fine scales. Since the early 20th century, however, fires have been completely excluded. Fuel accumulation in the absence of fire and warming climate present challenges for future management.

SUBMITTER: Whitehair L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6202706 | biostudies-other | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Fire regime on a cultural landscape: Navajo Nation.

Whitehair Lionel L Fulé Peter Z PZ Meador Andrew Sánchez AS Azpeleta Tarancón Alicia A Kim Yeon-Su YS

Ecology and evolution 20180912 19

Fire has played an important role in the evolutionary environment of global ecosystems, and Indigenous peoples have long managed natural resources in these fire-prone environments. We worked with the Navajo Nation Forestry Department to evaluate the historical role of fire on a 50 km<sup>2</sup> landscape bisected by a natural mountain pass. We used fifty 5-ha circular plots to collect proxy fire history data on fire-scarred trees, stumps, logs, and snags in a coniferous forest centered on a key ...[more]

PMID: 30386580

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Project description:Wildfires are increasing in incidence and severity across coniferous forests of the western United States, leading to changes in forest structure and wildlife habitats. Knowledge of how species respond to fire-driven habitat changes in these landscapes is limited and generally disconnected from our understanding of adaptations that underpin responses to fire.We aimed to investigate drivers of occupancy of a diverse bat community in a fire-altered landscape, while identifying functional traits that underpinned these relationships.We recorded bats acoustically at 83 sites (n = 249 recording nights) across the Plumas National Forest in the northern Sierra Nevada over 3 summers (2015-2017). We investigated relationships between fire regime, physiographic variables, forest structure and probability of bat occupancy for nine frequently detected species. We used fourth-corner regression and RLQ analysis to identify ecomorphological traits driving species-environment relationships across 17 bat species. Traits included body mass; call frequency, bandwidth, and duration; and foraging strategy based on vegetation structure (open, edge, or clutter).Relationships between bat traits and fire regime were underpinned by adaptations to diverse forest structure. Bats with traits adapting them to foraging in open habitats, including emitting longer duration and narrow bandwidth calls, were associated with higher severity and more frequent fires, whereas bats with traits consistent with clutter tolerance were negatively associated with fire frequency and burn severity. Relationships between edge-adapted bat species and fire were variable and may be influenced by prey preference or habitat configuration at a landscape scale.Predicted increases in fire frequency and severity in western US coniferous forests are likely to shift dominance in the bat community to open-adapted species and those able to exploit postfire resource pulses (aquatic insects, beetles, and snags). Managing for pyrodiversity within the western United States is likely important for maintaining bat community diversity, as well as diversity of other biotic communities.

Dataset Information

Fire regime on a cultural landscape: Navajo Nation.

Publications

Fire regime on a cultural landscape: Navajo Nation.

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