Fire management faces important emergent issues in the coming years such as climate change, fire exclusion impacts, and wildland-urban development, so new, innovative means are needed to address these challenges. Field studies, while preferable and reliable, will be problematic because of the large time and space scales involved. Therefore, landscape simulation modeling will have more of a role in wildland fire management as field studies become untenable.

Fire management faces important emergent issues in the coming years such as climate change, fire exclusion impacts, and wildland-urban development, so new, innovative means are needed to address these challenges. Field studies, while preferable and reliable, will be problematic because of the large time and space scales involved. Therefore, landscape simulation modeling will have more of a role in wildland fire management as field studies become untenable. This report details the design and algorithms of a complex, spatially explicit landscape fire and vegetation model called Fire BGCv2. FireBGCv2 is a C++ computer program that incorporates several types of stand dynamics models into a landscape simulation platform. FireBGCv2 is intended as a research tool. Description of FireBGCv2 code, sample input files, and sample output are included in this report, but this report is not intended as a user's manual because the inherent complexity and wide scope of FireBGCv2 makes it unwieldy and difficult to use without extensive training. The primary purpose of this report is to document FireBGCv2 in adequate detail to interpret simulation results.

Excerpt from Fire-Bgc: A Mechanistic Ecological Process Model for Simulating Fire Succession on Coniferous Forest Landscapes of the Northern Rocky Mountains The second portion of this paper details the application of fire-b'gc to a whitebark pine (pinus albicaulis) forest in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex (bmw C) of Montana. This simulation is referred to in this paper as the bmw C project. The objective was to investigate the consequences of management policies on the whitebark pine ecosystem dynamics in a spatial domain. Several management scenarios were simulated on a ha upper subalpine landscape in the southwestern part of the Swan Range of the bmwc to determine the response of whitebark pine to vari ous management actions. Many fire-bgc parameters presented in this paper were quantified specifically for this study area using field data collected by Keane and Morgan (1994) and Keane and others Ex amples of these parameters are provided throughout model documentation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This successional model called FIRE-BGC simulates long-term stand dynamics on coniferous forest landscapes of the Northern Rocky Mountains. This model can be used to investigate cumulative fire effects for various fire scenarios, including prescribed burning, fire exclusion, & historical fire regimes. FIRE-BGC is an individual tree model FIRESUM with the mechanistic ecosystem biogeochemical model FOREST-BGC. Ecological processes that act at a landscape level, such as fire & seed dispersal, are simulated annually from stand & topographic information contained in spatial data layers.

Forest landscape disturbances are a global phenomenon. Simulation models are an important tool in understanding these broad scale processes and exploring their effects on forest ecosystems. This book contains a collection of insights from a group of ecologists who address a variety of processes: physical disturbances such as drought, wind, and fire; biological disturbances such as defoliating insects and bark beetles; anthropogenic influences; interactions among disturbances; effects of climate change on disturbances; and the recovery of forest landscapes from disturbances—all from a simulation modeling perspective. These discussions and examples offer a broad synopsis of the state of this rapidly evolving subject.