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Originally Posted by Jay-qu
Heres my take on it:
Well if there was no fire suppression than everynow and again the forest would be cleaned out, so these days the forest is partly protected and allowed to build up fire fuel. When the fires do eventually happen they end up bigger than the natural ones that happened more frequently years ago.
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This is indeed a big problem. People make regular fire breaks and end up preventing 'natural' fires for years on end. Problem is, a lot of plants have adapted to this, to such an extent that quite a few plants' seeds can't germinate until they've burnt. Sorta like stomach acids do to fruit pips. If you want to make those seeds germinate that was designed to go through an animal's gut first in order to get widely distributed, you need to soak it in vinegar first. But I digress.
After vegetation have 'built up' beyond the natural two- or three year burn cycle time, when it does burn, it burns a heck of a lot hotter than it would have done, ending up killing all the seeds that were to germinate after a 'cold' fire. The fire obviously kills the host plant, but the seeds were designed to survive. To survive a 'cold' fire, that is. This practice of creating unnatural firebreaks might even be detrimental to the survival of quite a few species of plants, I imagine.
