Purpose of Review

The goal was to synthesize the literature on wildland fires, how they create resilient landscape mosaics that affect ecosystem function and maintenance of biodiversity, and how the fires themselves are affected by wilderness edge effects and climate change. The emphasis is on cold-temperate and boreal forests.

Recent Findings

The interactions of fires with landforms create large-magnitude spatial and temporal heterogeneity in fire severity that cannot be seen in smaller natural areas. Patterns of live and dead biomass and characteristic syndromes of fire-species interactions determine future successional trajectories and spatial-temporal dynamics of landscape mosaics. Therefore, wildlands with freely occurring fires provide a scientific baseline for complexity of vegetation structure and maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem processes on time scales from years to centuries and millennia. Although wildlands are impacted by climate change, they may have considerable resilience, partly due to fire occurrence, and may still serve as a moving baseline. Thus, the patterns observed in wildlands can be used as blueprints for restoration of landscape structure, biodiversity, and ecosystem function in human-dominated ecosystems.

Summary

Wildland fires play an important role in maintenance of ecological function and biodiversity, even on landscapes where fire is considered to be rare. At time scales of centuries, fires in large wilderness areas maintain a balance among successional stages, and although early and late-successional stages are rarely absent, their occurrences change in space and time, possibly leading to metapopulation dynamics for species that depend on certain successional stages. Over thousands of years, fires influence the trajectory of ecosystem retrogression, and in cold climates, fires can prevent ecosystem acidification that reduces forest productivity. Fire regimes within large wildlands are subject to change caused by fragmentation effects at large spatial extents; this can result in increased or reduced fire frequencies (disturbance dilution effect) within wildlands. Wildland managers need to think about how changes in the surrounding landscape influence the integrity of the natural disturbance baseline, while forest managers need to think about how harvesting compares to the baseline with respect to maintenance of productivity and biodiversity.

中文翻译：

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荒地大火：了解和维护生态基线

审查目的

目的是合成有关野火的文献，它们如何创建影响生态系统功能和生物多样性维护的弹性景观马赛克，以及野火边缘效应和气候变化如何影响火本身。重点是冷温带和北方森林。

最近的发现

火与地貌的相互作用在火的严重程度上造成了大幅度的时空异质性，这在较小的自然区域是看不到的。生活生物量和死亡生物量的模式以及火种相互作用的特征综合征决定了景观马赛克的未来演替轨迹和时空动态。因此，发生火灾的荒野为植被结构的复杂性以及维持生物多样性和生态系统过程提供了科学的基准，时间尺度从几年到几百年甚至几千年。尽管荒地受到气候变化的影响，但它们可能具有相当大的复原力（部分是由于发生火灾），并且仍可以作为移动基准。因此，在荒野中观察到的模式可以用作恢复景观结构，生物多样性，

概要

野火在维持生态功能和生物多样性方面起着重要作用，即使在认为火很少发生的景观上也是如此。在几个世纪的时间尺度上，大片荒野地区的火灾在演替阶段之间保持平衡，尽管很少出现继发阶段和后期阶段，但它们的发生时空变化，可能导致依赖于某些演替的物种的种群动态阶段。几千年来，大火影响着生态系统退化的轨迹，在寒冷的气候中，大火可以阻止生态系统酸化，从而降低森林生产力。大型荒地内的火灾状况可能会因在较大空间范围内的碎片效应而发生变化；这可能会导致荒野内火灾频率增加或减少（干扰稀释效应）。荒地管理者需要考虑周围景观的变化如何影响自然干扰基线的完整性，而森林管理者则需要考虑在维持生产力和生物多样性方面收获与基线相比如何。