Fire regimes, fire ecology, and fire management in Mexico.
I propose several broad fire regimes and provide an analysis of fire ecology for the principal vegetation types in Mexico. Forty percent of Mexican ecosystems are fire-dependent (pine forests, several oak forests, grasslands, several shrublands, savannas, palm lands, wet prairies, "popal" and "tular" swamps), 50% are fire-sensitive (tropical rain forests and tropical seasonal forests, tropical cloud forests, mangrove, fir forests, several oak forests, and several shrublands), and the remaining 10% fall into fire-influenced (such as several gallery forests) and fire-independent categories (shrublands in most xeric environments, very high-altitude prairies). I also present an analysis of current fire-management trends, highlighting the trend toward integral fire management, which merges prevention and control, community-based fire management, and ecological fire management.
Rodríguez Trejo
Dante Arturo
DA
División de Ciencias Forestales, Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, México. dantearturo@yahoo.com
D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000639:trends*; D004463:Ecology; D017753:Ecosystem; D005390:Fires; D008800:Mexico; D014197:Trees