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Wildfire suppression in the United States has had a long and varied history. For most of the 20th century, any form of wildland fire, whether it was naturally caused or otherwise, was quickly suppressed for fear of uncontrollable and destructive conflagrations such as the Peshtigo Fire in 1871 and the Great Fire of 1910.
The Federal Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) provides operational fire-control services and links to all provincial and territorial fire agencies. During a typical year there are over 9,000 forest fires in Canada, burning an average of 2.5 million hectares (ha) or 9,700 square miles (25,000 km 2). The number of fires and area ...
At this time in history fire was viewed as a threat to timber, an economically important natural resource. As such, the decision was made to devote public funds to fire suppression and fire prevention efforts. For example, the Forest Fire Emergency Fund Act of 1908 permitted deficit spending in the case of emergency fire situations. [4]
Presently, many isolated pine rockland sites throughout Miami-Dade County and the lower Keys suffer from fire suppression, leading to drastically altered plant compositions. [26] It is estimated that around 5,000,000 ha of pine rocklands burned in 1926, whereas only 76,486 ha burned in 1995 and 2003. [ 27 ]
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 ...
The benefits of forest management have been seen throughout history, and natives knew the dangers of letting forests become overly dense. [18] Fire was used to keep large areas of forest and mountains free of undergrowth for hunting or travel. It also was a tool to help manage natural resources such as food.
Fire suppression, in combination with other human-caused environmental changes, may have resulted in unforeseen consequences for natural ecosystems. Some large wildfires in the United States have been blamed on years of fire suppression and the continuing expansion of people into fire-adapted ecosystems as well as climate change. [5]
Fire history, the ecological science of studying the history of wildfires, is a subdiscipline of fire ecology. Patterns of forest fires in historical and prehistorical times provide information relevant to the vegetation pattern in modern landscapes.