Fire-Vegetation-Microclimate Feedbacks under Simulated Global Change in Savanna – Wetland Ecotones

Abstract:

Boundaries between pyrogenic and adjacent pyrophobic vegetation communities are created and maintained by positive feedbacks between fire, vegetation, and microclimate. These feedbacks either promote or hinder fire and the boundary is situated at the transition from flammable to non-flammable. Consequently, vegetation is only directly influenced by fire if it is burned. Therefore, revealing where fire stops between communities is important for understanding their capacity to withstand change. We identified vegetation structure and microclimate components as predictors of fire spread along a (pyrogenic) savanna – (pyrophobic) wetland ecotonal gradient in North Carolina, USA. The ability of the fire feedback to maintain the transition from flammable to non-flammable conditions under potential global change is not known. We built a cellular automaton which employed Markov transition probabilities and associated fire spread probabilities to simulate the conditions of the ecotonal gradient under differing fire frequencies. Changes to the gradient boundaries were estimated from the location of the flammable to non-flammable transition. Our simulations produced movement of the boundary under certain fire return intervals. In general, more frequent fires resulted in fire failure deeper into wetland, and less frequent fires resulted in fire failure nearer savanna. Our simulations indicate that fire feedbacks are capable of controlling boundary locations up to a perturbation threshold, but that this control is not absolute. The transition from flammable to non-flammable within these pyrogenic-pyrophobic ecotones is essential to distinct communities. The management and conservation of these systems is fire-focused and, therefore, improving predictions about where fire stops under global change is important for those objectives.