ENVST 3230 - Pyrogeography: Fire, Humans, and the Environment

Meets with GEOG 5230. Graduate students should enroll in GEOG 5230 and will be held to higher standards and/or more work. Fire is an inherently geographical process. Fire can affect landscapes on spatial scales from local to subcontinental and fire can affect, and be affected by processes that occur in our day or over millennia. The past, present and future role of wildland fire is a major concern to scientists, land managers, and the public. Concerns over issues such as forest health and sustainability, especially in light of global change, have added urgency to understanding the role of fire in ecosystems. To understand the interaction of fire and ecosystems the following topics will be covered in this course: the history of humans and fire, fire physics, fire weather, wildlands fuels, fire ecology including the effects of fire on plants and soils, methods of obtaining fire history including historical documents, dendrochronology, and paleoecological proxy, fire regimes, how humans have evolved with fire, how humans have modified fire, fire management, fire problems in urban-wildland interface, and future fire regimes.