Abstract:
Fire is considered a critical management tool in fire prone landscapes. Often studies
and policies relating to fire focus on why and how the fire regime should be managed,
often neglecting to subsequently evaluate management’s ability to achieve these
objectives over long temporal and large spatial scales. This study explores to what
extent the long-term spatio-temporal fire patterns recorded in the Kruger National
Park, South Africa has been influenced by management policies and to what extent it
was dictated by underlying variability in the abiotic template. This was done using a
spatially explicit fire-scar database from 1941 to 2006 across the 2 million hectare
Park. Fire extent (hectares burnt per annum) (i) is correlated with rainfall cycles (ii) exhibits no long-term trend and (iii) is largely non-responsive to prevailing fire
management policies. Rainfall, geology and distance from the closest perennial river
and the interactions between these variables influence large-scale fire pattern
heterogeneity: areas with higher rainfall, on basaltic substrates and far from rivers are
more fire prone and have less heterogeneous fire regimes than areas with lower
rainfall, on granitic substrates and closer to rivers. This study is the first to illustrate
that under a range of rainfall and geological conditions, perennial rivers influence
long-term, landscape-scale fire patterns well beyond the riparian zone (typically up to
15 km from the river). It was concluded that despite fire management policies which
historically aimed for largely homogeneous fire return regimes, spatially and
temporally heterogeneous patterns have emerged. This is primarily because of
differences in rainfall, geology and distance from perennial rivers. We postulate that
large-scale spatio-temporal fire pattern heterogeneity is implicit to heterogeneous
savannas, even under largely homogenizing fire policies. Management should be
informed by these patterns, embracing the natural heterogeneity-producing template.
We therefore suggest that management actions will be better directed when operating
at appropriate scales, nested within the broader implicit landscape patterns, and when
focusing on fire regime parameters over which they have more influence (e.g. fire
season).
