Parr Catherine L, Andersen Alan N
Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, CSIRO Tropical Ecosystems Research Centre, PMB 44, Winnellie, 0822, NT, Australia.
Conserv Biol. 2006 Dec;20(6):1610-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00492.x.
Fire management is increasingly focusing on introducing heterogeneity in burning patterns under the assumption that "pyrodiversity begets biodiversity." This concept has been formalized as patch mosaic burning (PMB), in which fire is manipulated to create a mosaic of patches representative of a range of fire histories to generate heterogeneity across space and time. Although PMB is an intuitively appealing concept, it has received little critical analysis. Thus we examined ecosystems where PMB has received the most attention and has been the most extensively implemented: tropical and subtropical savannas of Australia and Africa. We identified serious shortcomings of PMB: the ecological significance of different burning patterns remains unknown and details of desired fire mosaics remain unspecified. This has led to fire-management plans based on pyrodiversity rhetoric that lacks substance in terms of operational guidelines and capacity for meaningful evaluation. We also suggest that not all fire patterns are ecologically meaningful: this seems particularly true for the highly fire-prone savannas of Australia and South Africa. We argue that biodiversity-needs-pyrodiversity advocacy needs to be replaced with a more critical consideration of the levels of pyrodiversity needed for biodiversity and greater attention to operational guidelines for its implementation.
火灾管理越来越注重在“火多样性产生生物多样性”这一假设下引入燃烧模式的异质性。这一概念已被正式确定为斑块镶嵌燃烧（PMB），即通过操控火灾来创建一系列代表不同火灾历史的斑块镶嵌，以在空间和时间上产生异质性。尽管PMB是一个直观上有吸引力的概念，但它几乎没有受到批判性分析。因此，我们研究了PMB最受关注且实施最为广泛的生态系统：澳大利亚和非洲的热带及亚热带稀树草原。我们发现了PMB的严重缺陷：不同燃烧模式的生态意义仍然未知，理想火灾镶嵌的细节也未明确。这导致基于火多样性言辞的火灾管理计划在操作指南和有意义评估能力方面缺乏实质内容。我们还认为，并非所有火灾模式都具有生态意义：这在澳大利亚和南非火灾频发的稀树草原上似乎尤为如此。我们主张，生物多样性需要火多样性的倡导应被更批判性地考虑生物多样性所需的火多样性水平以及更关注其实施的操作指南所取代。
