Towards a sounder fire ecology

Fire ecology in Laikipia, Kenya

Paleoecological Perspectives on Fire Ecology: Revisiting the Fire-Regime Concept

Fire is well recognized as a key Earth system process, but its causes and influences vary greatly across spatial and temporal scales. The controls of fire are often portrayed as a set of superimposed triangles, with processes ranging from oxygen to weather to climate, combustion to fuel to vegetation, and local to landscape to regional drivers over broadening spatial and lengthening temporal sc...

Towards a more reproducible ecology

of research papers. But this development also poses some important challenges. The large amount of project-specific software being generated for analytical studies means that analytical standards are harder to establish, potentially limiting the reproducibility of much of recently published science. Also, analytical and coding errors may escape detection, with potentially highly problematic res...

Evolutionary fire ecology: lessons learned from pines.

Macroevolutionary studies of the genus Pinus provide the oldest current evidence of fire as an evolutionary pressure on plants and date back to ca. 125 million years ago (Ma). Microevolutionary studies show that fire traits are variable within and among populations, especially among those subject to different fire regimes. In addition, there is increasing evidence of an inherited genetic basis ...

Climate Change Refugia, Fire Ecology and Management

Early climate change ideas warned of widespread species extinctions. As scientists have probed more deeply into species responses, a more nuanced perspective emerged indicating that some species may persist in microrefugia (refugia), including in mountainous terrain. Refugia are habitats that buffer climate changes and allow species to persist in—and to potentially expand under—changing environ...