A landscape may be envisioned as a space partitioned by a number of ecosystem types, and so it conforms to a neo-Clementsian model of succession. A corollary is that intermediate disturbance rates should maximize landscape (beta) diversity. This was confirmed using eight boreal forest landscapes in northwestern Ontario, Canada, where intermediate rates of forest fire were associated with highest landscape diversity. Because current measures of evenness subsume a richness measure, it is not, as yet, feasible to assess the relative contributions of evenness and richness to biological diversity, and thus it was not possible to determine the roles of numbers of habitat types and relative amounts of habitat types in the above situation. Both theory and observations suggest that forest fire control in fire-prone landscapes increases landscape diversity, but that it is lowered by fire control in landscapes of intermediate to low diversity.
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Faculty of Environmental Studies, University of Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Roger Suffling, Catherine Lihou & Yvette Morand
Suffling, R., Lihou, C. & Morand, Y. Control of landscape diversity by catastrophic disturbance: A theory and a case study of fire in a Canadian boreal forest. Environmental Management 12, 73–78 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01867378
Issue Date: January 1988
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01867378
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