Pre-Quaternary History

Traditional farming, as we know it today, has been around for between 7 – 10 thousand years. Firestick Farming was invented by the Indigenous / Aboriginal people of Australia tens of thousands of years before the traditional farming of today. Firestick Farming is the burning of small, manageable patches of land to change it for the good of the people using the land. Fires were lit during the early dry season, so that they would not burn out of control. Indigenous people burned away the undergrowth in forests and bushland areas. This helped seed germination in some plants, it helped create more grasslands which attracted many grass-eating mammals to hunt, it helped rejuvenate useful plants and animals, and prevented big uncontrolled fires.

Modern humans today have the option to go to their local grocery stores for food and water. However, that is not case with early humans, to survive they had to hunt, or gather their food. Harsh climate changes could cause a scarce food supply. Without any food to hunt or find, the small groups were forced to move. Early humans would eventually overcome some of these obstacles, by learning how to make simple tools. One of the biggest discoveries was how to start a fire (Wilkinson, 16). Harsh climates soon became bearable with the aid of fire. Approximately 120,000 years

There are also so many animals that go along with the damage from the fires because they are living in the middle of it and do not have any where to go. It makes sense that actions such as controlled burns should be done because so much could be prevented. Then again there are so many people who argue against them because they are a disruption to the environment. “Fire experts argue that prescribed burns are vital for reducing the risk of catastrophic blazes and restoring ecosystems that evolved with fire” (Tobin 2). If a great deal of damage could be prevented, I do not see why there should be any concern. This is especially important when you look at what more damage is done to the environment during a huge forest fire compared to on from a petite controlled burn.

4. Humans used fire to ward off predators, adapt to colder climates, and to assist in hunting and gathering. Other technologies included stone tools which were used for both hunting and protection.

Anstey Hill Recreation Park proves an interesting area to study the effects of bushfire on native ecosystems as a path winding up the hill provides a fire break. This break is what allows the two differing burn areas to be studied. The 2012 fire was a prescribed burn as the area had previously been unburnt since Ash Wednesday in 1983. Prescribed burns are conducted to reduce the fire danger associated with the fuel that builds up over time in the

Fires can either be natural or anthropogenic, which can depend on any situation. A study conducted in 2004 on a wild fire at Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, suggests that the fire can

The Appalachians span over a distance of 1,600 miles, ranging across 14 states, from Newfoundland in the North, to Alabama in the South. The Appalachians are the oldest chain of mountains on the North American continent. With forest, comes forest fires, some natural and some prescribed by humans. In order to reduce the calamitous damage caused by natural wildfires, the technique of prescribed fires is used. This is done by diminishing the amounts of trees, shrubs, and brush in the intended area. By doing this, new native plant growth is encouraged and it helps maintain some plant and animal species that depend on the periodic fires. With this man made force comes numerous effects on vegetation, wildlife, and the human impact.

Stromatolite forms and is the first organisms on the earth they were formed by very thin layers of single-celled organisms.

Much like all events and natural phenomena that pose a threat to civilization, humans have learned to cope with and prevent the loss of human life and destruction of property in devastating blazes that can break out seemingly at random. Fighting fires was not always the science it is today, but due to the use of new technologies and the fundamental understanding of what fire is, how it spreads, how it can kill, and how it is stopped, our protocol when dealing with fires has increased our success rate and continues to grow with applications of engineering, chemistry, and meteorology.

The domestication of fire had a huge implication on Hominid evolution. There has been lots of debate about the early millions of years of Hominid history and how the domesticated fire helped curving this history.

Humans have been changing the Western forests' fire system since the settlement by the Europeans and now we are experiencing the consequences of those changes. During the summer of 2002, 6.9 million acres of forests was burnt up in the West (Wildland Fires, 1). This figure is two times the ten year annual average, and it does not look like next summer will be any better (Wildfire Season, 1).

The origin of fire is approximated to be the Paleozoic era (540 mya), especially with the origin of the Silurian land plants. This is because before the photosynthetic organisms the atmosphere lacked enough oxygen and fuels to ignite fire (Glasspool, 2004). This particular period provide some lessons for the current fires in some regions, such as some of the fire regimes evident today occurred during this period like surface fires in many Northern Hemisphere coniferous forests (Cressler, 2001), high frequency and light surface fires evident by charcoal fragments and tree ring patterns (Francis, 1984) similar to today’s fire patterns in some Northwest American pine forests (Allen et al. 2002).The succeeding fire history was marked by high

The F-test values in canopies (0.031271512) and sub-canopies (0.005008424) are both below 0.05 so we can say with 92% confidence that the canopy structures in burned and unburned areas differ and with 97% confidence that the sub-canopies vary between the burned and unburned areas. Unburned areas tended to have better developed structures of canopy and sub-canopy trees because they were given more time to accumulate compared to recently burned areas which have recently undergone a disturbance. The F-test value for DBH (0.022472008) is also below 0.05 so we also have to assume that there is variance in terms of DBH in burned and unburned sites. Unburned sites have larger trees (larger DBH) because these trees had more time to grow compared to trees in recently burned sites. Since the F-tests values for the logs (0.076083352) and shrubs (0.340469754) were calculated to be above 0.05, we are not able to draw definitive conclusions on this data, therefore we have to assume that the logs and shrub structures did not vary within the burned and unburned sites (Klowden et al. 2015). Succession is evident in this experiment as there is an overall greater percent coverage of grasses, woody plants, and annuals & perennials in burned areas compared to open space. Open space is greatest in unburned areas and there is more open space in unburned areas than burned areas; this is mainly because the woody plants in unburned areas store lots of nutrients within themselves, therefore having less grasses and smaller plants on forest floors (Dickman et al 2014). Five different species of canopy trees were identified in unburned sites compared to only three species of canopy trees identified in burned sites which allows me to conclude that there is more diversity in the species of canopy trees in unburned areas than burned areas. There may have been more types of species found in unburned

When undergrowth in a forest was burned away, certain plants were more likely to grow back than others, and so humans could cause things such as edible bracken to grow in abundance, providing

Forests have covered the earth for millions of years, providing habitat and food for animals and humans. These forests have stabilized different ecosystems and have continued the natural cycle that keeps plants and animals in check. The discovery of fire changed all of this. It was the beginning of deforestation, a process that has continued and increased over the last 200,000 years. Humans are the responsible party for the deforestation that has occurred. Humans discovered that animals could be driven with fire. This led to accelerated forest loss due to uncontrolled burning for hunting use (Miller & Tangley 1991: 28). Agriculture was the next problem