Past, current, and future fire frequencies in Quebec's commercial forests: implications for the cumulative effects of harvesting and fire on age-class structure and natural disturbance-based management

Abstract

The past decade has seen an increasing interest in forest management based on historical or natural disturbance dynamics. The rationale is that management that favours landscape compositions and stand structures similar to those found historically should also maintain biodiversity and essential ecological functions. In fire-dominated landscapes, this approach is feasible only if current and future fire frequencies are sufficiently low compared with the preindustrial fire frequency, so a substitution of fire by forest management can occur without elevating the overall frequency of disturbance. We address this question by comparing current and simulated future fire frequency based on 2 × CO2 and 3 × CO2 scenarios to historical reconstructions of fire frequency in the commercial forests of Quebec. For most regions, current and simulated future fire frequencies are lower than the historical fire frequency, suggesting that forest management could potentially be used to maintain or recreate the age-class distribution of fire-dominated preindustrial landscapes. Current even-aged management, however, tends to reduce forest variability by, for example, truncating the natural age-class distribution and eliminating mature and old-growth forests from the landscape. Therefore, in the context of sustainable forest management, silvicultural techniques that retain a spectrum of forest compositions and structures at different scales are necessary to maintain this variability and thereby allow a substitution of fire by harvesting.

Accounting for spatial autocorrelation improves the estimation of climate, physical environment and vegetation’s effects on boreal forest’s burn rates

“…BRs were then classified into 4 classes representing the recent past natural variability of BRs in eastern Canada (Bergeron et al 2006): Null (BR = 0; n = 331); Low (BR \ 0.5%; n = 486); Medium (0.5% \ BR \ 1.5%; n = 219); and High (BR [ 1.5%; n = 78) (Fig. 2c).…”

Rating a Wildfire Mitigation Strategy with an Insurance Premium: A Boreal Forest Case Study

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“…For example, cumulative effects of even minor modifications to forest management practices distributed across numerous headwater reaches might be significant for key downstream AES at the scale of regional drainage basins (e.g., [57][58][59]). Furthermore, legacy cumulative effects may be exacerbated by emerging forest management practices like those based on emulating natural disturbance regimes [60,61], increasing industrial encroachment on previously unmanaged landscapes [7], and a growing forest biomass removal industry to provide biofuel feedstock [62].…”