Effects of Long-Term Water Balances on Fire Regime, North-Western Minnesota

Abstract

In this paper long-term records of fire occurrence are compared with water-balance estimates over the last 160 years in old-growth stands at Itasca State Park, northwestern Minnesota. Analyses of fire scars on red pine (Pinus resinosa) and stratigraphic charcoal analysis in separate studies demonstrated that fire probability depends on time since the last fire, as fuels accumulate, and on the average climate, with fire frequency responding to decade- and century-scale changes in moisture conditions. Here the dependency of fire occurrence on intra- and inter-annual variability in the climate series is explored