Fire | Christian Kull

Vegetation fire and cultural landscapes in Fiji

March 8, 2014

There are three main types of fire in Fiji. Sugar cane farmers burn their fields to facilitate hand harvesting. Village farmers clear forest plots, fallow fields, and secondary vegetation for diverse crops using fire. And finally, the fires that cover the most ground are those set in the grasslands of the drier, lee-side of the islands. And of course there are occasionally fires that cause trouble – late last year I saw a major fire burning through the pine plantations in southeastern Viti Levu.

: Sugar cane burns at night south of Nadi, Fiji

: Fire scar from grassland fire, southeastern tip of Vanua Levu, Fiji

: Uplands in the centre of Viti Levu (Fiji): a pyrocultural landscape

: A grassy hill burns at dusk on village land, southeastern tip of Vanua Levu, Fiji

: Farmer heading to his fields with fire stick, Tailevu, Viti Levu

: Close up of fire stick

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Leave a Comment » | Fiji, Fire, Research | Tagged: Fiji, fire, fire management, grassland | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Pyric phases in Madagascar’s longer-than-presumed prehistory

August 7, 2013

An exciting archaeological find by Bob Dewar [1] and colleagues suggests the presence of hunter-gatherers on Madagascar around 4000 years ago, which essentially doubles the length of the history of Madagascar’s human settlement. Their discovery, published in PNAS [2], suggests four thousand years of people living, burning, cultivating, shaping, transforming, and developing the island’s environment, instead of around two thousand [3]. From a pyrogeography perspective, Dewar and colleagues make an important point towards the end of their paper: Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Fire, Madagascar, Research | Tagged: archaeology, environmental history, fire, fire regimes, Madagascar, pyrogeography | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

The unexceptional fires in Madagascar’s grasslands

March 8, 2012

The prehistoric dynamics of fire, vegetation, and humans in Madagascar are still not resolved, though one might get a different impression from the simplified narrative told to galvanise conservation action. Clearly, humans visited, hunted, and eventually settled the island over the last several thousand years, and lit the vegetation on fire throughout. But what kinds of fire, in what kind of vegetation, how often, and with what impact? Charcoal and pollen in lake sediment cores and archaeological digs have informed most of our recent scientific understandings of fire history on the island. Perhaps further answers and hypotheses can be found from innovative botanical, remote sensing, and modelling research being done in Africa. Most striking perhaps – in the face of all the alarmist discourse about the menace des feux de brousse in Madagascar – is how unimpressive Madagascar’s fires appear in any remote sensing image that includes neighbouring Africa (this one is taken from Archibald et al. 2010 in the International Journal of Wildland Fire).