MNP Ecology Center

Fire And European Settlement

European settlers continued Indian burning practices but often increased fire frequency and carried fire into more remote areas (Pyne 1982, Cronon 1983, Batek et al. 1999). In general, during the period 1850 to 1930 (somewhat earlier in New England and Atlantic coastal areas), when Europeans were busy converting a North American wilderness into farms and villages, fires were the most frequent in the region's history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, fires burned on average every 5 to 6 years in Ontario oak-pine forests (Howe and White 1913, Dey and Guyette 2000), every 3 to 4 years in southeastern Ohio oak forests (Sutherland 1997), every 10 years in northeast Kansas oak gallery forests (Abrams 1985) and in southern New England (Niering et al.

1970), and every 13 years in oak-pine forests of the Great Smoky Mountains (Harmon 1982). Similar fire frequencies and trends in fire history have been reported for oak woodlands and glades in the Missouri Ozarks (Guyette and McGinnes 1982, Guyette and Cutter 1991, Cutter and Guyette 1994). These estimates of fire frequency are conservative, because not all fires resulted in fire scars on surviving trees.

Fires, and now other forest disturbances such as grazing, logging, and fuelwood cutting, maintained the open, parklike character of eastern forests, with understories dominated by grasses and herbaceous plants (Komarek 1974, Wright and Bailey 1982). Frequent burning, grazing, and logging created forests of sprout origin dominated by oaks. In fact, when much of the area of southern New England, New York, and New Jersey was mapped by Hawley and Hawes (1912), they named it the "Sprout Hardwoods Region."

Fires burned extensively following wholesale logging of the Great Pineries of eastern North America (Howe and White 1913, Kittredge and Chittenden 1929). In the early 1900s, many of our most famous fires burned millions of acres of cutover forests and took the lives of many people in the Lake States. The cycle of logging and burning also greatly reduced the extent of pine forests in eastern North America. After the mature, seed-bearing pines were harvested, intense slash fires and repeated burnings eliminated or greatly reduced the abundance of pine reproduction. In addition, frequent burning (e.g., every 3 years on average) for up to 100 years before the pine logging era may have eliminated much of the pine advance reproduction (Record 1910, Guyette and Dey 1997). Aspen, white birch, and jack pine replaced the white and red pine forests in the Great Lakes Region (Heinselman 1973). Elsewhere, oaks succeeded the pines and shade-tolerant mesophytic hardwoods (Abrams 1992). Oaks expanded their dominance on mesic, highly productive sites through frequent and widespread burning. The stage was set for a great expansion of oak throughout eastern North America.

The widespread suppression of wildland fires began in the 1930s and 1940s in most regions of eastern North America; however, in the Ozark Highlands and in the South, wildland fires were common until the 1950s (Pyne 1982, Pyne et al. 1996). The occurrence of wildland fires has dropped drastically over the past 100 years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the fire rotation period was 90 years in Michigan and 50 years in Pennsylvania (Whitney 1994). Before European settlement in the Missouri Ozarks, mean fire intervals averaged about 3 years (Guyette and Cutter 1991, Cutter and Guyette 1994), and the fire rotation period

Table 4.2

Estimated fire rotation periods for the modern period for oak-pine-dominated forests in eastern North America

Table 4.2

Estimated fire rotation periods for the modern period for oak-pine-dominated forests in eastern North America