PARENT SESSION
Monday, August 7, 5:00-6:30 pm
Poster Session 1 - Disturbance ecology
Exhibit Hall, Ballroom Level, Cook Convention Center
When fire suppression fails: a GIS-based analysis.
Calef, Monika*,1, McGuire, A. David2, Chapin, F. Stuart3, 1 University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, USA2 USGS AK Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit, Fairbanks, AK, USA3 University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK
ABSTRACT- In Alaska, annual wildfires consume large tracts of boreal forest leading to an annual area burned that varies several magnitudes between years, depending on local weather and fuel conditions. Humans influence wildfires directly via fire starts and suppression, though once fires exceed a certain size suppression is nearly impossible. While the effectiveness of fire suppression is apparent on a local scale, implications on a regional scale are less clear. We are using a GIS-based approach to evaluate regional fire suppression over two decades with fire management zone as an indicator for suppression effort. We chose three study areas located in the Interior of the State where most of the fires occur which cover over 9 million hectares combined. Using GIS, we overlaid fire polygons from 1984 to 2004 in the Alaska Large Firescar database with their respective fire management zones and extracted annual area burned. Results show that most of the area burned over the 20 years can be attributed to a few large fire years which differ among study areas but include 1988, 1990, 1993, 2001, 2002, and 2004. When all years are combined, total area burned significantly depends on designated fire management zone (Chi square test with alpha = 0.05) however, this is not the case when years are analyzed individually. Our study investigates what happens during these anomalous years when suppression seems to fail and thereby contributes valuable insights to the current debate on effectiveness of fire suppression in the boreal forest.
Key words: boreal forest, fire suppression, Alaska