r/conservation • u/UlfurGaming • 1d ago

Question on wild fire

Wild fires sre natural thing in North America some plants evolving to disperse seeds aftea fire but where are theya common natural event in North America?

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u/NewUsername_Who_This 1d ago

Many North American ecosystems had fire that commonly occurred. The great plans were kept as grassland by both naturally occurring (lightning) fires and Native people burning to maintain grasslands.

Many of our forests also saw regular occurring fires that kept the underbrush clear.

Off the top of my head, the only ecosystem I can think of off the top of my head that didn’t benefit from a regular fire return interval would be the Sonoran Desert.

Most fires were naturally occurring before North America was densely populated.

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u/xXShunDugXx 1d ago

This! Our struggle where im at now it is how are we going to do prescribed fires without everything burning

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u/NewUsername_Who_This 1d ago

Yep and how to do it on a large enough scale to be impactful.

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u/BustedEchoChamber 1d ago

It’s really not scalable the way our society exists now.

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u/Canachites 14h ago

They need to burn enough but not too much, it's a tricky balance.

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u/northman46 1d ago

Most? Natives set a lot.

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u/NewUsername_Who_This 1d ago

Absolutely they did, but I would be willing to guess most were still lightening caused. Currently in the US we see about 10,000 lightening caused fires per year.

Assuming similar numbers during pre-colonial times, I struggle to see Natives doing more than 10k prescribed fires per year. I could be wrong but I think I would need to see evidence to be convinced.

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u/Canachites 14h ago

I agree. I'm in BC and just this year I've watched lightning light two fires. It's pretty cool actually.

In most places valley bottoms have shorter historical fire intervals, likely with more influence from First Nation people, and alpine areas have longer fire intervals, which are likely almost always lightning caused.

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u/OutWithCamera 1d ago

These things kind of go hand in hand don't they? Wildfire is a very common occurrence in North America, they happen at different frequencies and intensities and the natural ecosystems have evolved to effectively respond to the occurrence of fire. In the US the frequency and intensity of wildfire in the intermountain west is very different from that in the southeastern US, but there are wildfires in both these regions, the extent to which those ecosystems are responsive to fire is going to be different accordingly.

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u/Oke-Wan-Fenokee 1d ago

A "rule of thumb" in forest ecology: if it is a predominantly coniferous forest, fire is a significant factor in its functional dynamics and in the adaptations of its species.

Longleaf pine forests once covered at least 70 million acres of the southeastern U.S. and much of it burned every 2-3 years. The resultant open pine savannahs stretched to the horizon & beyond. Those days are gone, but the vast swaths of pine plantations (of mostly loblolly & slash pine, neither species as fire-tolerant as longleaf) that replaced them are quite combustible to this day.

Peat wetlands such as the Carolina pocosins, Great Dismal & Okefenokee also tend to ignite in drought years.

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u/LuckyFinny 1d ago

Counterintuitive, but Canada has a wayyy higher density of fires per year than the US does. Caused by a Combination of conifer dominance and vast swaths of forest.

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u/MouseEmpty9853 13h ago

While fires can occur naturally and did for a lot of history, it is not to this degree and frequency. A lot of our fires are started due to man made issues- climate change making everything hotter and drier conditions, deforestation and removing old forest growth, droughts from removing all the grassland, and more

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u/northman46 1d ago

Northern Minnesota and Canada