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- Title
Planning for resilience: modeling change in human-fire interactions in the Alaskan boreal forest.
- Authors
Chapin III, F. Stuart; Rupp, T. Scott; Starfield, Anthony M.; DeWilde, La-ona; Zavaleta, Erika S.; Fresco, Nancy; Henkelman, Jonathon; McGuire, A. David
- Abstract
The development of policies that promote ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability requires collaboration between natural and social scientists. We present a modeling approach to facilitate this communication and illustrate its application to studies of wildfire in the interior of Alaska. We distill the essence of complex fire-vegetation interactions that occur in the real world into a simplified landscape model, and describe how equally complex fire-human interactions could be incorporated into a similar modeling framework. Simulations suggest that fire suppression is likely to increase the proportion of flammable vegetation on the landscape and reduce the long-term effectiveness of wildfire suppression. Simple models that test the consequences of assumptions help natural and social scientists to communicate objectively when exploring the long-term consequences of alternative policy scenarios.
- Subjects
ALASKA; TAIGAS; FORESTS &; forestry; SOCIAL scientists; WILDFIRES
- Publication
Frontiers in Ecology & the Environment, 2003, Vol 1, Issue 5, p255
- ISSN
1540-9295
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1890/1540-9295(2003)001[0255:PFRMCI]2.0.CO;2