Impacts of Fire on the Greater Everglades Ecosystem

Historically, fire has been influential in shaping and maintaining the biotic components of the Greater Everglades ecosystem. As a result, Everglades National Park has been at the forefront of NPS fire policy development. In 1948, Everglades National Park was the first to allow prescribed burns and one of the first parks to develop a fire management plan. Big Cypress National Preserve began its fire program in 1978.  Since then, fire management researchers have acquired a substantial amount of wildfire history data in the form of paper records, tabular data, fire perimeters hand drawn on 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps, aerial photography from 1940 to 2010, and GPS perimeters. Fire history geodatabases were constructed from this collection of data to describe in detail the location and attributes of fires that have occurred from 1948 through 2011. The important role of wildfire on the landscape makes the availability of these data in a GIS format vital for many park planning and operational functions including ongoing fire management activities, fire ecology studies, and a variety of resource management issues related to the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

http://fl.biology.usgs.gov/