Figure 2
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INTRODUCTION
Fire is a natural disturbance that recurs across western
North America to drive ecological
dynamics. My thesis will reconstruct
fire histories and their impacts on vegetation to quantify fire frequency
and severity and determine the relative influence of and interactions
among topography and human land-use as controls on fire in forests classified
by mixed-severity fire regimes along an elevational gradient in the
montane conifer forests on the
windward side of the Selkirk Range surrounding Nelson, British Columbia from 1700-Present (Figure 1).
The Study Area follows an approximation of the ridge lines to the north and south of West Arm Lake since research aims to reconstruct fire histories in forests that
supply drinking water to communities on both shores of the
Lake. To select sites suitable for fire history
reconstruction from within the 175,996
hectares (ha) study area, I searched a forest cover database to
identify stands of trees
that predated European settlement (Figure 2). From the
resultant subset, I stratified polygons into low-, intermediate- and
high-frequency Historic Natural Fire Regime strata (HNFR). The
HNFR classification is a coarse-scale estimate of fire frequency and
severity prior to European settlement and based on forest structure,
slope, and aspect (Blackwell et al. 2003). Within each stratum, I randomly
selected three forest stands for analysis. Due to difficulties
with access to stands in the high-frequency class on the south side
of Kootenay Lake, I only sampled two stands but sampled four stands
on the north side of the lake.
Figure 1
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