Once humans discovered how to tame fire, they began using it for heat, for cooking, to scare away animals and to alter their environs, especially burning areas to plant and to restore grazing land.
Once humans discovered how to tame fire, they began using it for heat, for cooking, to scare away animals and to alter their environs, especially burning areas to plant and to restore grazing land. In Madagascar, scientists and conservationists have long believed that fire is a leading cause of high landscape degradation, but an international team of researchers have found that medium to large fires on the island are similar to other tropical locations.
"On Madagascar, it is assumed that fire is driving degradation," said Leanne Phelps, postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at Penn State, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh and Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. "We are taking a new comparative approach and asking: Is fire different on Madagascar? And is it responsible for high rates of landscape degradations?"
The researchers report today (May 18) in Global Change Biology that Madagascar's fire regimes are similar to 88% of tropical burned areas with shared climate and vegetation characteristics. They also found that Madagascar's relatively high tree losses where not centered around boundaries between forest and savannah, but occurred internally in forests without landscape-scale fires, suggesting medium to large fires did not cause high rates of tree loss.
Read more at Penn State
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