Why do fires help the boreal forest

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We would like to thank C. Van Der Horn and G. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Rebecca C. Peer review information Nature thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available. Photograph by E. First, ignition locations, dates and causes according to official fire databases were extracted.

In four steps, the algorithm filters these ignitions by date, distance to an old burn scar, and co-occurrence of lightning strikes and infrastructure elements. Small overwintering fires that were not detected by satellite products were used to derive thresholds for the algorithm. Overwintering fires emerge earlier after the seasonal snow melt a and closer to a fire scar from the year before b than other fires.

Day since regional snow melt was taken from government sources. Shown are histograms of lag time between lightning strikes and ignition detections a , and distance to road for ignitions by humans b. The black lines indicate the thresholds used to eliminate potential overwintering fires due to spatial proximity to infrastructure and spatiotemporal proximity to lightning strikes.

Panels a , c , e show data for interior Alaska, and panels b , d , f for the taiga plains and the taiga shield of the Northwest Territories. Panels a , c , e show data for Alaska, and panels b , d , f for the Northwest Territories. Reprints and Permissions. Overwintering fires in boreal forests.

Download citation. Young black spruce seedlings will usually establish in the first 5 to 10 years after a fire. Deciduous trees, such as birch or aspen, come back quickly after fire. In some cases, they sprout from below ground roots or they grow from seeds that blow in from nearby trees. Shrubs such as willow, blueberry, Labrador tea, and shrub birch re-sprout if the fire lightly burns the soil. If a fire burns deeply and burns the roots, the shrubs depend more on seeds to reproduce.

Plants with non-woody stems, such as fireweed and grasses, will also become more plentiful soon after a fire. These young forests are important for wildlife. Moose browse the deciduous shrubs and trees. Voles and small animals eat the new green plants. These small animals are prey for owls, fox, and marten.

The mosses and lichens that blanket the ground are fuel for the fire and the fire usually burns them completely. New pioneer species of mosses and liverworts start to grow.

Over time, as the spruce canopy grows, so will the feather mosses and lichens. These mature forests are important for caribou and many species of birds. Fire is a natural part of the boreal forest. Boreal forests have burned naturally for thousands of years. In Siberia, fires sent clouds of smoke into the air over Russian towns hundreds of miles away from the burning. Large evacuations like the one ordered for the Chuckegg Creek fire are becoming more common as homes and human activities encroach further into forests.

Extreme fire seasons in the boreal could become the norm, locking in a dangerous feedback loop that contributes to further warming as carbon is released. Understanding the complexity of increasing fires in boreal forests will be crucial to combatting their contribution to climate change. The fire alarms are already ringing. If we fail to respond, we do so at our own risk.

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What can we help you find? Filter Your Site Experience by Topic Applying the filters below will filter all articles, data, insights and projects by the topic area you select. It ranges in composition from pure deciduous and mixed deciduous-coniferous to pure coniferous stands. The diversity of the forest mosaic is largely the result of many fires occurring on the landscape over a long period of time.

These fires have varied in frequency, intensity, severity, size, shape and season of burn. This photo sequence shows: 1 A fire, 2 The regrowth of aspen 1 year after fire, 3 Burned tree with black-backed woodpecker, 1 year after fire, 4 A year stand, 5 A year stand, 6 years of growth, 7 Old-growth forest with gap dynamics. Different species, however, respond differently to fire. The ongoing challenge for fire management agencies is therefore how to manage fire to protect human values while still allowing fire to play its important ecological role in maintaining healthy forests.