Yellow Stone Fire Research Paper

Why is fire an important part of Yellow Stone? How does this seem to affect the habitat of it? What is the history behind fires in Yellowstone National Park? Does climate change play a role? These are all the things that I am going to talk about but first, we need to understand what fire regimes are? A fire regime is a term that gives a common pattern in how fires naturally happen in a certain ecosystem over a longer period of time. “Scientists classify fire regimes using a combination of factors including frequency, intensity, size, pattern, season and severity.” If there wasn’t small frequent or sometimes large fires to create a diversity in plant communities for different growth, then biodiversity would decrease and all the dead leafs and dead trees would accumulate much faster and not return to the soil for nutrients. Yellow Stone benefits from these fires because the vegetation has learned to adapt to the fires and in some cases depend on the fires. Fires help remove the overstory which allows for different plant …show more content…
The “fires create a landscape more diverse in age, which reduces the probability of disease or fire spreading through large areas. An example of this adaptation is in the lodge pole pines trees they have two different types of pinecones that are produced, serotinous cones the makeup about 80% of the park's forest. The serotinous cones won’t release their seeds until the resin seal is melted. This adaptation allows for the seeds not to disperse until fire creates conditions that are favorable. Another example would be the Douglas Fir seed, it needs conditions that can only exist in rare microhabitats in the grasslands. If the seed reaches a microhabitat during the year a seedling will develop. The fires tend to kill the seedling but the mature Douglas Fir tree has thick bark that can resist the fire