Use of prescribed fire in land management, nature conservation and forestry in temperate-boreal Eurasia

Resumo

In large parts of temperate-boreal Eurasia the use of fire, including historic slash-and-burn (shifting) agriculture and other disturbances by land cultivation have contributed to shape landscape patterns of high ecological and cultural diversity and value, e.g. heathlands, open grasslands and meadows. In the eastern Euro-Siberian biota, e.g. in the light taiga, natural fire contributed to the shaping of open and stress-resilient forest ecosystems. The rapid socio-economic changes in the past four decades and the recently increasing trend of rural exodus all over Eurasia, however, have resulted in abandonment of traditional land-use methods. With the elimination of these disturbances by cultivation, including traditional burning practices, large areas of Europe are converting to fallow lands, a process that is associated with ecological succession towards brush cover and forest, and an overall loss of open habitats. Besides the loss of valuable biodiversity the abandoned lands constitute an increase of wildfire hazard – a trend that is revealed by a growing number of extremely severe fire disasters. Similarly, the exclusion of fire in natural ecosystems such as northern boreal and sub-boreal coniferous forests in Eurasia has resulted in changing vegetation composition and an increase of wildfire hazard, notably in Central-Eastern Eurasia. Changing paradigms in ecology and nature conservation currently have led to reconsideration of fire-exclusion policies in certain sectors of land / landscape management, nature conservation and forestry. This paper is an updated version of the “White Paper on Use of Prescribed Fire in Land Management, Nature Conservation and Forestry in Temperate-Boreal Eurasia” of 2009 (Goldammer 2009)