Burning the Seasonal Mosaic: Preventative Burning Strategies in the Wooded Savanna of Southern Mali

“In flammable biomes, such as tropical savannas and seasonally dry forests, there is often a conflict between fire regimes that support biodiversity and those regimes designed to reduce fire risk to humans and their infrastructure or that support livelihoods such as pastoralism and forestry (Laris, 2002).”

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“The relative prevalence of small fires outside the regular fire season may be related to anthropogenic influences on fire regimes, as human fire management tends to concentrate on periods with higher rainfall rates to inhibit large fires later in the season when fuels are drier and fires burn more intensively (32, 33).”

“By contrast, agricultural communities light fire breaks to protect their crops, and use fire to open new land for cropping and to burn agricultural residue (46).”

“PMB has also been linked to traditional burning by indigenous peoples in a range of ecosystems globally (e.g., Laris 2002; Vale 2002; Bowman et al. 2004; Mistry et al. 2005).”

“For example, both have demonstrated the exaggerations and simplifications involved in desertification (or arid land degradation) and tropical deforestation, especially as translated from the researcher to the policy- or decision-making communities (43, 40, 65, 119, 120).”

“Historically, indigenous cultures have applied fire to promote food resources, improve hunting, enhance access through land and control wildfire (Bowman 1998; Turner et al. 2000; Kimmerer and Lake 2001; Laris 2002).”

“…seminatural grasslands, frequent burning is used to prevent woody encroachment, to selectively enhance grass production, for obtaining a green flush (Mbow et al. 2000), or, in the case of patch burning early in the burning season, to protect the landscape from later destructive fires (Laris 2002).”

“Pastoralists’ observations suggest that following the official banning of fire, the woodlands have thickened and over-grown the herbaceous layer (see also Cossins and Upton 1988; Mbow et al. 2000; Laris 2002; Natcher 2004; Sheuyange et al. 2005).”

“Traditional fire management has instead focused on manipulating fire intensity, rather than frequency (Laris 2002, Laris and Wardell 2006).”

“, 2005) might not easily be transferable to Africa, where much higher rural population densities and different land use practices become important in affecting regional patterns of burning (Frost, 1999; Laris, 2002; Hudak et al., 2004).”

“Africa is often referred to as a ‘fire continent’ (Trollope and Trollope, 1996) because of widespread anthropogenic fires (i.e. fire associated with anthropogenic land use) that annually burn the savanna vegetation (Mbow et al., 2000; Reid et al., 2000; Laris, 2002; Danthu et al., 2003).”

“…of grassy, surface fuels of northern Australian savannas and, more importantly, isolate the effect of reducing fire size, a demonstrated outcome of intentional burning across multiple ecosystems (Mbow et al. 2000; Laris 2002; Bowman et al. 2004; Bliege Bird et al. 2008; Bilbao et al. 2010).”

“First, as mentioned above, is the creation of natural firebreaks within the landscape to protect particular vegetation patches generating a landscape in which some patches burn regularly and others rarely burn (Laris, 2002).”

“Indigenous fire regimes in other environments strongly affected by ENSO-related climate cycling, such as Southern andWestern Africa, have been shown to provide similar effects, creating small-scale fire mosaics that prevent interannual and interseasonal variation in lightning fire spread (45, 46).”

“Indeed, analysis of indigenous burning practices from around the world reveals a common pattern of numerous small fires set before the onset of the fire season, thereby creating a mosaic of burned and unburned areas (57, 58).”

“Nepstad (2002) notes that the first need is to quantify and systematize field observations to understand why fires are lit and which fires are fought.”

“…been conducted in other countries where fire suppression has not occurred at the same level as in Canada, Australia and the USA (for example, see Laris 2002; Mathews 2005; McDaniel et al. 2005; Mistry et al. 2005; Kull and Laris 2009; Shaffer 2010; de Melo and Saito 2013; Sletto and Rodriguez…”

“The prevalence of fire has over time created a degree of fire dependency for the growth, production, regeneration and coexistence of herbaceous and woody savanna vegetation (Werner 1991; Whelan 1995; Van Wilgen and Scholes 1997; Laris 2002).”

“…in small savanna patches, producing seasonal mosaic landscapes (Bilbao et al. 2010; Eloy et al. 2016b; Welch et al. 2013), as also described in tropical savannas of Australia (Bird et al. 2008; Russell-Smith et al. 1997), South Africa (Parr and Brockett 1999) and Western Africa (Laris 2002).”

“Increasing connectivity of fields and pastures (Figure 4j–l), probably maintained by setting fires (Bruzon, 1994; Laris, 2002), was associated with increased population density and increasing demands for resources.”

“The human control on the timing of burning in savannas makes that early season fires fragment the landscape and prevent the spatial diffusion of later damaging fires (Laris, 2002).”

“The impact of landscape fragmentation on reducing fire in agricultural area has also been documented [16,39,40].”

“In Mali, although burning for the green flush is clearly one reason, the earliest burning is carried out on soils that support short annual grasses that have no use for grazing as they do not re-sprout and are not palatable (Laris, 2002).”

“(Costello et al., 2000; Laris, 2002; Stevens et al., 2017).”

“Patch mosaic burning is also often used for safety purposes as it is thought to prevent larger, uncontrolled fires later in the season (Laris 2002; Keeley & Fotheringham 2001).”

“…climatic, biotic and anthropogenic factors involving various feedbacks (Scholes, & Archer 1997, Hoffmann et al. 2002, Van Langevelde et al. 2003, Beerling & Osborne 2006,) and they are still not well understood either in their ecological or in their human aspects (Laris 2002, Wiegand et al. 2006).”

“Our results show that the fire activity in the Colombian Llanos savannas produces a changing seasonal mosaic of burned and unburned vegetation patches, such as found in other savannas of the world (Laris, 2002).”

“Small baobabs are underabundant, and large baobabs overabundant, in fallows and woodlands, habitats that are not fire-protected (Laris, 2002).”

“This may explain why pastoral fires cause conflicts between conservation policies and local communities, as reported in western (Hough 1993; Laris 2002) and eastern Africa (Boutrais 2008; Johansson et al.”

“The consequence is that seasonality remains undervalued as a primary aspect of natural fire regimes [27, 28], despite its ecological and evolutionary significance, especially in frequently burned savannas and grasslands [9, 29, 30].”

“Indigenous burning practices in West Africa promote early burning and therefore landscape fragmentation in order to limit large and intense fire events which could occur at the end of the fire season (Laris, 2002; Laris and Wardell, 2006; Le Page et al., 2015; Archibald, 2016).”

“Only recently have researchers begun to systematically explore the role of human agency on the landscape with regards to fire ecology (Anderies et al. 2002; Laris 2002; Bird et al. 2005;Kepe 2005; Mistry et al. 2005).”

“Studies have found that fires are set for a litany of reasons (Hough 1993; Mbow, Nielson, and Rasmussen 2000; Laris 2002).”

“Common property literature has multiple examples of situations where privatization of common property has proven detrimental for resource management that benefits from collective decision making such as fire and watershed management (eg, Muldavin 1997 ; Laris 2002 ).”

“…complex and not only relates to the interactions between the technical aspects of satellitesensor systems and the ecological properties of the grassland ecosystem but includes the spatial and temporal scales of human activity in managing the grasslands [Bradley and Millington, 2006; Laris, 2002].”

“…through fire in California (Anderson 1999); northern Canada (Lewis and Ferguson 1988); Australia (Bird et al. 2005; Russell-Smith et al. 1997; Lewis and Ferguson 1988); Indonesia (Russell-Smith et al. 2007); Mali (Laris 2002); Brazil (Mistry et al. 2005) and the Mediterranean (Blondel 2006).”

“However, interventionist strategies (e.g. rigid stocking quotas) have consistently failed to deliver improvements to the environmental condition and the livelihoods of the people who depend on it (Laris, 2002).”

“Because of local variation in moisture and topography, the result of such early fires is a patchy, fine-grained mosaic of burned and unburned grasses (Whitehead et al., 2003, p. 416), which serves to protect certain vegetation patches and to enrich biodiversity (Braithwaite, 1996; Laris, 2002; Mistry, 2005; see also L…”

“Similarly, while interesting research has been done on indigenous use of fire in Africa (Laris 2002), it has not been integrated with the rangeland and conservation literature or used to inform fire management (although this is also changing).”

“…for, inter alia, improving both pasture and hunting landscapes, clearing fields for crops, or preventing destructive fires later in the dry season (Eriksen 2007; Laris & Wardell 2006), whilst the conservation goals of protected areas may not be aligned with this (Eriksen 2007; Laris 2002).”

“Furthermore, fire plays an essential ecological role in shaping the structure and composition of rangeland vegetation (Laris 2002; Angassa and Oba 2008b).”

“…been shown to impart positive effects on human and ungulate foraging returns, habitat diversity, and species abundance as well as the mitigation of wildfire spread by reducing fuel loads and fire intensities (Laris 2002; Bilbao et al. 2010; Bliege Bird et al. 2012; Fowler 2012; Seijo et al. 2015).”

“Second is the perhaps unprecedented focus on human-related ecological disturbances in changes – both historical and recent – that range from human-environment dynamics of fluvial geomorphology to forest fragmentation, grassland dynamics (including fire regimes), ecological invasives, and various sorts of human-modifie…”

“…many reasons for burning, including clearing land for agriculture, promoting growth of pasture, creating habitat for game animals, eliminating pests, and providing protection from uncontrolled wildfires (Lewis and Ferguson 1988; Coutinho 1990; Goldhammer 1993; Mistry 1998; Boyd 1999; Laris 2002).”

“We attribute this enhanced fire regime to intensifying burnings by indigenous pastoralists to improve the grazing quality of pasture (cf. Laris, 2002; Laris & Wardell, 2006).”

“…fragmented into savanna patches in different stages of succession through the use of early and late dry season fires in relation to climatic forces, biological succession, ecosystem and topographic characteristics, and the seasons used for different livelihood practices (Lewis, 1989; Laris, 2002).”

“Further, there can be a need to burn out fuels early in the fire season to create firebreaks and prevent high-intensity lateseason wildfires (Hough 1993, Mbow et al. 2000, Laris 2002).”

“collaboration between conservation workers and local farmers and pastoralists [67,74,144].”

“2005), fodder production, creating pasture land (Vayda 1996; Laris 2002; Eriksen 2007; Shaffer 2010), security from wild animals (Hough 1993; Roveta 2008), increasing agricultural production (Sinha and Bawa 2002; McDaniel et al.”

“In other countries, wildfire management programmes may be closely linked to local communities (Parr et al., 2009), particularly where fire management is cultural, resources are lacking and fires pose a threat to human safety and livelihoods (Laris, 2002; Myers, 2006).”

“A seasonal mosaic is a landscape that is annually re-created by people, and which contains patches of unburned, early burned, and recently burned vegetation (Laris, 2002).”

“Selection of a single value of the time-gap parameter for global studies [1,7,14], not accounting for fire regimes specificities, such as the formation of a “seasonal mosaic” of fire-affected areas [11,27], and the occurrence of consecutive days of missing land surface observation due to clouds of smoke, may lead to a…”

“Near settlements, farmers annually burn grassland and some woodland patches to prevent destructive fires and to prepare fields (Laris 2002).”

“As expected based on the literature on human fire management practices in this region (Mbow et al., 2000; Laris, 2002), most fire associated with pasture and non-agricultural land occurs in the early dry season – i.e., before January.”

“Smaller burned patches are a common occurrence across tropical savannas and are mainly associated with traditional fire management practices [18, 21, 58, 59].”

“essarily incompatible with conservation goals and may have beneficial ecological effects in terms of biodiversity, susceptibility to catastrophic fires, and productivity of culturally desirable species (Anderson 2005; Bilbao et al. 2010; Bird et al. 2005; Cochrane 2009; Fairhead and Leach 1996; Falleiro 2011; Laris 20…”

“…started to spread in Venezuela in the nineteenth century, not long after fire started to become conceived worldwide as a destructive force to nature rather than as a tool for landscape management (Kull, 2002a, 2004; Laris, 2002, 2004; Lewis, 1989; Mbow, Nielsen, & Rasmussen, 2000; Press, 1987).”

“While the mechanisms governing fire control in other emergent, human driven regimes operate on seasonal (Laris 2002) or decadal (Bird et al. 2008) scales, in the Pyrenees they are on a centennial or perhaps millennial scale.”

“To date, researches with these characteristics are restricted to selected areas of the Australian (Russel-Smith et al., 1997) and African (Laris, 2002, 2005) savannas.”

“Pastures and rangelands often see regular burning to reinvigorate the soil and control non-palatable weeds (Uhl and Buschbacher, 1985; Laris, 2002).”