The range and variation of historical landscape dynamics could provide a useful reference for designing fuel treatments on today's landscapes. Simulation modeling is a vehicle that can be used to estimate the range of conditions experienced on historical landscapes. A landscape fire succession model called LANDSUMv4 (LANDscape SUccession Model version 4.0) is presented here as a tool for estimating historical range and variation (HRV) of landscape characteristics. The model simulates fire and succession on fine scale landscapes for land management applications. It simulates vegetation development as a deterministic process by changing the species composition and stand structure assigned to a polygon. Disturbance initiation is modeled stochastically and disturbance effects are based on the current vegetation conditions of the polygon. Details of all model algorithms are discussed and the model is demonstrated for two applications. Results of an extensive sensitivity and model behavior analysis are also presented.

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.

Managing today’s lands is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Complex ecological interactions across multiple spatiotemporal scales create diverse landscape responses to management actions that are often novel, counter-intuitive and unexpected. To make matters worse, exotic invasions, human land use, and global climate change complicate this complexity and make past observational ecological studies limited in application to the future. Natural resource professionals can no longer rely on empirical data to analyze alternative actions in a world that is rapidly changing with few historical analogs. New tools are needed to synthesize the high complexity in ecosystem dynamics into useful applications for land management. Some of the best new tools available for this task are ecological and landscape simulation models. However, many land management professionals and scientists have little expertise in simulation modeling, and the costs of training these people will probably be exorbitantly high because most ecosystem and landscape models are exceptionally complicated and difficult to understand and use for local applications. This book was written to provide natural resource professionals with the rudimentary knowledge needed to properly use ecological models and then to interpret their results. It is based on the lessons learned from a career spent modeling ecological systems. It is intended as a reference for novice modelers to learn how to correctly employ ecosystem landscape models in natural resource management applications and to understand subsequent modeling results.

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.