Long-term forest landscape responses to fire exclusion in the Great Xing'an Mountains, China

Abstract

Understanding of long-term forest landscape dynamics under fire exclusion, which have not been studied in north-eastern China, is increasingly needed for designing sound forest management and protection plans. In the present study, we examine whether long-term fire exclusion leads to catastrophic fires and whether the fire regimes altered by fire exclusion have changed the course of natural succession of dominant tree species. We designed two simulation scenarios - fire exclusion and no fire exclusion - and used LANDIS to study the long-term (300 years) fire regime dynamic and the succession of dominant tree species in terms of species abundance, age structure and spatial pattern. Our simula..