Variations in a regional fire regime related to vegetation type in San Diego County, California (USA) |
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Authors: | Michael L Wells John F O'Leary Janet Franklin Joel Michaelsen David E McKinsey |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-4493, USA;(2) Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, 301 Caspian Way, Imperial Beach, CA 91932, USA;(3) Department of Biology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-4614, USA;(4) Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060, USA |
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Abstract: | This study considers variations in a regional fire regime that are related to vegetation structure. Using a Geographic Information
System, the vegetation of San Diego County, Southern coastal California USA is divided into six generalized classes based
on dominant plant form and include: herbaceous, sage scrub, chaparral, hardwood forest, conifer forest and desert. Mapped
fire occurrences for the 20th century are then overlain to produce records of stand age, fire frequency and transitional stability
for each of the vegetation classes. A ‘Manhattan’ similarity index is used to compare and group transition matrices for the
six classes of vegetation. This analysis groups herbaceous, hardwood and conifer forests in one group, sage scrub and chaparral
in a second, and desert in a third. In general, sage scrub and chaparral have burned more frequently than other vegetation
types during the course of the 20th century. Temporal trends suggest that the rate of burning in shrub-dominated vegetation is either stable (chaparral) or increasing
(sage scrub), while the rate of burning in both hardwood and conifer forest is declining. This is consistent with a pattern
of increased fire ignitions along the relatively low elevation urban-wildland interface, and an increase in the efficiency
of fire suppression in high elevation forests.
This revised version was published online in May 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
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Keywords: | GIS-coupled modeling Landscape-scale vegetation change Regional fire regime Similarity index Southern California vegetation Spatial variability Transition matrices Vegetation classification |
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