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Fire serves many important functions within fire-adapted ecosystems. Fire plays an important role in nutrient cycling, diversity maintenance and habitat structure. The suppression of fire can lead to unforeseen changes in ecosystems that often adversely affect the plants, animals and humans that depend upon that habitat.
For example, trees evolved with fire-embracing traits can "sacrifice" themselves during fires. But they also cause fires to spread and kill their less flammable neighbors. With the help of other fire adaptive traits such as serotiny, flammable trees will occupy the gap created by fires and colonize the habitat.
For some species of pine, such as Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis), European black pine (Pinus nigra) and lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), the effects of fire can be antagonistic: if moderate, it helps pine cone bursting, seed dispersion and the cleaning of the underwoods; if intense, it destroys these resinous trees.
During California’s deadliest fire on record — the Camp Fire in Paradise that killed 85 people in 2018 — some homes built to the new codes “still burned to the ground,” Rose said.
The control of fire by early humans was a critical technology enabling the evolution of humans. Fire provided a source of warmth and lighting, protection from predators (especially at night), a way to create more advanced hunting tools, and a method for cooking food. These cultural advances allowed human geographic dispersal, cultural ...
Controlled burns have a long history in wildland management. Fire has been used by humans to clear land since the Neolithic period. [48] Fire history studies have documented regular wildland fires ignited by indigenous peoples in North America and Australia [49] [50] prior to the establishment of colonial law and fire suppression. Native ...
Vast networks of microscopic, underground fungi serve a crucial role in Earth’s ecosystems — and there’s a lot we don’t know about them. Nature's unsung hero, the humble fungus, could be ...
Fire regimes of United States plants. Savannas have regimes of a few years: blue, pink, and light green areas. When first encountered by Europeans, many ecosystems were the result of repeated fires every one to three years, resulting in the replacement of forests with grassland or savanna, or opening up the forest by removing undergrowth. [23]