Abstract
Dendrochronological methods were applied to reconstruct the historic occurrence of fires at a Cross Timbers forest-grassland transition site within the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma, USA. Sixty fire events occurred within the period 1712 to 2006 (294 years). The mean fire interval (MFI) was 4.4 years for a pre-Euro-American settlement period (pre-1901) and increased to a MFI of 5.2 years after 1901. During the period between 1855 and 1880, which corresponds with the prolonged severe drought called the Civil War drought, the mean fire interval was 1.7 years. Although twentieth century fire frequency has not been significantly decreased, the severity of fires appears to be lessened due to alterations to the fire environment through grazing and fire exclusion. Eastern red-cedar (Juniperus virginiana L.) expansion now poses significant challenges to forest and range management, particularly its control through prescribed fire. In the future, fire managers throughout the Cross Timbers region are likely to face similar challenges and look toward quantitative and science-based information about the historic fire regime for guidance.
Highlights
The Great Plains is a grass (Poaceae)-dominated biome that occupies roughly one tenth of North America (Licht 1997)
Post oak trees ranged in age from 100 years to 294 years
We identified and dated 122 fire scars that occurred from 60 different fire events (20.4 percent of years had fire)
Summary
The Great Plains is a grass (Poaceae)-dominated biome that occupies roughly one tenth of North America (Licht 1997). 1985), grazing and fire historically defined finer-scale variability of ecological processes and vegetation communities. Fires in grasslands are thought to have been historically very frequent (Wright and Bailey 1982) and, depending on grazing and climate, possibly annual (Anderson 1990, Bond and van Wilgen 1996). Annual burning of grasslands is possible across broad regions, no strong quantitative evidence exists to support that such a frequency occurred over long time periods, and questions remain about the historic range of variability of grassland fire regimes and the scale-dependence of fire frequency estimates. Fires burned heterogeneous landscapes with varied timing determined by many factors (e.g., weather, vegetation, grazing, time since last fire, topography) and, it is logical that characterizations of fire regimes and the resulting landscape patterns and ecological processes are scale-dependent (Falk et al 2007, Kerby et al 2007)
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