Abstract
A number of years ago, I was doing fieldwork in Ottawa National Forest’s Sylvania Wilderness Area in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula when a few miles east of there, on the sandy outwash near Crystal City, a large fire burned through some forests dominated by jack pine. When I went to see the burn after the fire was out, I saw charred standing snags almost everywhere. Few trees of any species escaped this fire. The landscape could easily be the backdrop for the line from the thirteenth century “Dies Irae” (“Days of Wrath”) in the Requiem Mass: “Heaven and Earth in ashes burning.”
Some species need fire to disperse their seeds even though the adults are killed. These species also have traits that make them highly flammable. How did this suite of traits evolve? How do these traits determine the fire regime across the landscape?
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Notes
- 1.
Henry (2002)
- 2.
In the far northern edge of their range, jack pines do not need fires to open their cones. Instead, the resin is shrunken and cracked without being previously melted when temperatures get below −40°C, which is the same as −40°F.
- 3.
Mutch (1970)
- 4.
Snyder (1984)
- 5.
Bond and Midgley (1995)
- 6.
Hamilton (1964)
- 7.
Rudolf et al. (1959)
- 8.
Teich (1970)
- 9.
Gauthier et al. (1996)
- 10.
Schwilk and Ackerly (2001)
- 11.
Whitham et al. (2003)
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© 2016 John Pastor
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Pastor, J. (2016). Fire Regimes and the Correlated Evolution of Serotiny and Flammability. In: What Should a Clever Moose Eat?. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-678-3_22
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