COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FIRE LOADS IN FOREST ECOSYSTEMS DISTURBED BY FIRE

Abstract

At present there is little information on the loads of forest fuels in different conditions and ecosystems. In accordance with this, the aim of the present work is to compare forest fuel loads in temperate forests and tropical forests. For which we used the methodology of planar intersections. Once the information was collected in the field, loads of the different fuel categories (timelag) were estimated in tons by hectare. Twenty-four clusters in six states of Mexico were assessed, half of which were disturbed (burned). Sites were located in temperate forests (Coahuila, Puebla and Jalisco) where the dominant vegetation is a pine-oak association, and an average availability of 17.90 ton ha -1 of biomass. On the other hand, the burned areas showed a considerable decrease of fuel load, nearly 10 ton ha -1. In tropical forests areas (Baja California Sur, Quintana Roo and Yucatan), the opposite occurred, since in the places where there was not fire fuel, material availability decreased, compared with burned sites where fuel loads increased more than twice (from 9 ton ha-1 to almost 23 ton ha 1). In the case of 1-hour fuels, a correlation close to 1 at the level of 0.05 was obtained, which indicates no statistical significance among the availability of fuels. It was concluded that the higher the range of fire, the greater the accumulation of fuels and the disturbance of these ecosystems.