Fire in Savanna Landscapes
A special issue of Fire (ISSN 2571-6255).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2022) | Viewed by 29888
Special Issue Editor
Interests: savanna; burned landscapes; fire history; land cover/land use change; Anthropocene; West Africa; Madagascar
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Fire is an omnipresent phenomenon in savanna environments, and the tropical savanna is the biome where most fire activity occurs worldwide. For a long time, bushfires were viewed with apprehension by the governing authorities and severely repressed, especially in colonized countries. They have thus been the subject of numerous regulations but also of control and management measures. The role of fire in savanna has also been studied for its impacts on vegetation, soils, and fauna at the scale of the ecosystem and that of the landscape. Studies have also attempted to show its contribution to the process of tropical forest degradation and even desertification.
Over the past two decades, the views of both scientists and environmental managers have gradually shifted. More critical environmental thinking, complex epistemological conceptions, and innovative observation and modeling methods favor new scientific approaches. Fire’s ecological role is best understood first as an intrinsic dynamic factor in savanna ecosystems, then as a generator of landscape heterogeneity, potentially leading to new forms of biodiversity (pyrodiversity). Palaeoenvironmental and historical studies demonstrate that savanna landscapes are mostly the manifestation of long-term interaction between humans and nature, of which one of the keys to deciphering is the history of the uses of fire and burning. In the social sciences, it is also concerned with understanding the indigenous fire management systems with less pejorative representations and how human strategies and livelihoods are significant variables that should be explored. The growing number of experiences with prescribed fires in protected areas is a living testimony to the change in the vision of environmental managers. At the same time, it is necessary to continue to observe and model the dynamics of burned areas and fire regimes in relation to vegetation, bioclimatic conditions, and diverse practices of the local populations to better understand their evolution in the context of climate and land-use change. Finally, fire is increasingly investigated as a crucial issue in the processes in action during the Anthropocene.
One of the objectives of the Special Issue is to question all these new approaches. While some savanna regions such as Australia or Brazil have been the subject of such studies, they are still insufficient elsewhere and deserve to be better disseminated. However, more monographic approaches are still necessary to document burned areas and characterize their fire regimes in many savanna landscapes. This type of study is welcome, especially in poorly documented regions in proportion to the importance of the role played by fires.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Prof. Dr. Aziz Ballouche
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- Savanna landscape
- Savanna ecosystem
- Land cover
- Bushfires
- Fire ecology
- Fire regimes
- Fire history
- Pyrodiversity
- Human dimensions of fire and burning
- Wildfire management
- Land use change
- Climate change
- Anthropocene
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Related Special Issue
- Fire in Savanna Landscapes, Volume II in Fire (3 articles)