Forest Fires: Behavior and Ecological Effects

Edited by:
  • Edward A. Johnson &
  • Kiyoko Miyanishi
Academic: 2001. 594 pp. $74.95

Major forest fire research programmes were set up during the twentieth century in an attempt to reduce the considerable costs of forest fires to society and to provide a scientific basis for forest fire management systems. A new synthesis of forest fire science that promises to distil the vast scientific literature produced by these programmes is a welcome contribution. Edward Johnson and Kiyoko Miyanishi have edited this volume to foster a more mechanistic, physically based approach to forest fire science, going beyond the 'traditional' descriptive approaches. The book is intended to bridge the gap between elementary forest fire texts and the highly technical literature on the subject. To these ends, it is partially successful. The book provides a rich summary of our current knowledge of several important aspects of forest fire science, from fuel dynamics to coupled atmosphere–fire modelling. But it lacks a synthesis of the ecological and economic importance of forest fires and an integrated analysis of the critical gaps in our understanding of this phenomenon.

Dozens of careers and decades of research have been devoted to forest fire science in the United States, Canada, Australia and Russia. But in the emerging forest fire hotbeds of Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico, forest fire scientists can be counted on the fingers of one hand. These disparate scientific communities have very different reading needs. The decades-old forest fire school has already developed and tested empirically based approaches to assessing the risks of forest fires. It has also modelled fire behaviour and fuel dynamics in many forest types, and documented the ecological effects of forest fires. Fire laboratories in these countries examine the physical and chemical aspects of forest fires under controlled conditions. Johnson and Miyanishi target this school, hoping to speed up its transition to physically based forest fire science. And it is for this audience that the book will be most useful.

The incipient forest fire research communities of developing nations are just beginning to conduct the type of descriptive research that Johnson and Miyanishi hope to move beyond. We still don't know how much of the Amazon or Bornean rainforests catch fire each year, for example; at least 10,000 square kilometres of standing forest were ignited in each region during the severe droughts of the 1997–98 El Niño episode. The book highlights a pioneering study of forest fires in Amazonia by Christopher Uhl and Boone Kauffman as an example of the flawed, descriptive forest fire research that must be avoided. But Uhl and Kauffman's is both an important and a timely contribution, documenting selective logging effects on the mass and moisture content of the fuel layer. The way in which the leaf canopy regulates the flux of radiant energy to the forest interior is the single most important determinant of tropical rainforest flammability, but this is not mentioned in Forest Fires.

An effective bridging of the gap between elementary forest fire texts and the highly technical forest fire journals requires overview chapters describing the ecological and economic importance of forest fires on a global scale, and indicating the most important gaps in the science.The absence of such chapters in Forest Fires means that the forest fire neophyte encounters chapters rich in equations and literature references, but poor in didactic explanations of the basic principles of forest fire behaviour and its ecological effects. An issue as important as the effect of global warming on future fire regimes is tucked away in a chapter on “Climate, weather and area burned”, illustrated by illegible maps.

The book's strength is as a state-of-the-art review of research on pyrolysis, flames, lightening, fuel–moisture dynamics, smoke, combustion chemistry, and more. Every chapter carefully defines its notation, and some of the chapters are written in engaging prose. But the editors' odd attack on descriptive research sends the wrong message to prospective forest fire scientists in regions suffering rapidly escalating problems with such fires. The first step in establishing research programmes in places such as Amazonia, Borneo and Mexico is to walk through burning and burned forests, talk to property owners who ignite and fight fire, and quantify and systematize these field observations. My fire science students and colleagues in the Brazilian Amazon use Forest Fires as a reference. But the inspiration for their studies is still the classic Introduction to Wildland Fire by Stephen Pyne, Patricia Andrews and Richard Laven (Wiley, 1996).