NSF Award
9018381
The magnitude of the Yellowstone fires of 1988, which were the largest fires every experienced in a national park within the continental United States, has created an exceptional opportunity to address some of the central questions in ecology today. Drs. Romme, Turner and Gardner will use the Yellowstone National Park fires to ask three basic questions: First, how climate and landscape pattern interact to create situations in which extremely large fires are possible. The investigator's previous experience suggest that there may be thresholds in parameters of landscape structure and meteorological conditions that interact to control fire size. They propose to identify the thresholds and then use them in a modeling approach to explore the implications of global climate change for Yellowstone's disturbance regime. Second, Drs. Romme, Turner and Gardner ask how fire size affects landscape pattern. They hypothesize that landscape heterogeneity is greatest with fires of intermediate size and least with very small or very large fires. They will test this hypothesis by using remotely sensed imagery and the Park's geographic information system. Third, they ask how plants having different modes of reproduction respond to fire size, severity, and heterogeneity. They will sample areas burned from 1972 to 1988 in three successive field seasons to test specific hypotheses relating landscape parameters (e.g. the size of a burned patch, distance from an unburned edge, and internal heterogeneity of a burned patch) to the reestablishment of individual species and to community richness. This investigation of Yellowstone fires will not only help us understand the events of 1988 but will provide insights into interactions between vegetation patterns and ecological processes in all landscapes. Drs. Romme, Turner and Gardner are international experts in the area of landscape ecology. The facilities for this research are excellent.
