Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Fire regime
Summary
A fire regime is the pattern, frequency, and intensity of the bushfires and wildfires that prevail in an area over long periods of time. It is an integral part of fire ecology, and renewal for certain types of ecosystems. A fire regime describes the spatial and temporal patterns and ecosystem impacts of fire on the landscape, and provides an integrative approach to identifying the impacts of fire at an ecosystem or landscape level. If fires are too frequent, plants may be killed before they have matured, or before they have set sufficient seed to ensure population recovery. If fires are too infrequent, plants may mature, senesce, and die without ever releasing their seed.
Fire regimes can change with the spatial and temporal variations in topography, climate, and fuel. Understanding the historic fire regime is important for understanding and predicting future fire regime changes and the interactions between fire and climates.
Fire regimes are characterized by a variety of factors including vegetation composition, fuel structure, climate and weather patterns, and topography. Because fire regimes are highly dependent on the landscape and ecosystem in which they occur, there is no standard classification for fire regimes. However, characteristics such as those described below are commonly used to characterize fire regimes on a broad scale. Other factors such as post-disturbance successional stages and types of previous management on the landscape may also be used to describe a fire regime's characteristics. Climate directly impacts the frequency, size, and severity of fires, while also affecting the vegetation structure and composition. Fire regimes are also impacted by topography, slope exposure, landscape management, and ignition (which may be human or lightning-caused). Animals are another agent capable of affecting and changing fire regime by modifying control factors of fires such as amount, structure, or condition of fuel.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.