Emulating natural disturbances as a forest management goal: Lessons from fire regime simulations

Emulating natural forest disturbance is an increasingly popular forest management paradigm that is considered a means of achieving forest sustainability. Adopting this goal requires a sound understanding of natural disturbances at scales that correspond to management policies and strategies. In boreal forest landscapes driven by periodic stand-replacing fires this requires knowledge of fire regime characteristics, especially their spatial and temporal variability as well as stochasticity. The major goal of this study was to demonstrate the utility of fire regime simulation modeling to explore the variability of fire regime characteristics, with respect to formulating and assessing forest management strategies. We conducted a modeling experiment in a boreal forest landscape of northwestern Ontario, Canada, to examine its long-term fire regime in relation to forest policies on harvest size distribution. We used BFOLDS, a spatially explicit fire regime model that simulates individual fire events mechanistically in response to fire weather, fuel patterns, and terrain. The fire regimes in four large eco-regions were modeled for a 200-year period under three fire-weather (cold, normal, and warm) scenarios, with replications. We found that fire size distribution in all eco-regions followed power law under all weather scenarios, but their slopes and intercepts varied among eco-regions and fire weather scenarios. Warming fire weather increased burn rates and fire numbers in all eco-regions, albeit to different degrees. Overall, the variability among eco-regions was higher than the variability among fire weather scenarios, and among replicates. Comparisons of simulated fire size classes with those from an 86-year long fire history showed that empirical data cannot capture the variability that could be revealed by simulation modeling. We also show that fire size distribution is spatially heterogeneous within eco-regions, and provide several suggestions for forest policy directions with respect to forest harvest size distributions and harvest rates, based on the variability of fire regime characteristics. An assessment of present forest policies of emulating natural disturbances that guide forest harvest sizes showed that these are incongruent with simulated fire size distributions under all scenarios with one exception. Overall, this study illustrates the value of scenario simulation modeling to explore and quantify the variability of forest fire regime, for use in forest policies and strategies that attempt to emulate natural disturbance.