| 1. Perhaps the most urgent challenge facing humanity is to understand the
factors determining the limits to resilience of regional systems that are changing directionally in
biophysical and social drivers. This research program will document the changing role of fire, particularly as
affected by human activities, on the Arctic Climate System and its human residents. The research will focus on
Alaska and Yukon Territory, a large regional system in which fire is the dominant disturbance mechanism. The
proposed research has intellectual merit at several levels: 1. It will assess the changing role of human
activities in the fire regime of the Alaska- Yukon region as this is determined by changes in the effects of
people on fire (ignition and suppression) and the effects of fire on people, including economics (e.g., wages,
property risk) and ecosystem services (e.g., game, berries, firewood, timber, climate feedbacks).
2. It will evaluate the consequences of climate- and human-induced changes in fire regime on land-surface
properties that are important to climate. This is a critical link between research on human dimensions and
research on climate feedbacks.
3. It will document the past and plausible future changes in climate feedbacks in the Alaska-Yukon
region that result from climate warming and from climate- and human- induced changes in fire regime. It will
compare the contribution to atmospheric heating that comes from (a) trace-gas fluxes vs. water/energy exchange
and (b) arctic vs. boreal landscapes. This is the first comparison of the role of human activities within and
outside the Arctic on the Arctic Climate System. This research has broad implications for assessment of both
the short- and long-term consequences of the current policy of fire suppression near communities and roads.
Fire management in North America is currently struggling with issues related to the wildland-urban interface.
This modeling effort is one of the first to explicitly represent suppression in a dynamic landscape fire
succession model and will provide a management tool for assessing the consequences of different fire management
strategies (i.e., reactive versus preventative) for present and future fire regimes. Because of the importance
of fire-fighting wages in the economy of rural communities, this has implications for the sustainability of
subsistence activities. It will also assess the overall climate feedbacks caused by human activities outside
northern regions (global warming) as compared to effects resulting from human interactions with the fire regime
of northern regions. Because fire-induced changes in vegetation may be one of the few large negative feedbacks
to high-latitude warming, fire management provides a potential tool to mitigate this warming. The utility of
this mitigation strategy depends, however, on the net effects of fire on climate and on human welfare. This
study is the first attempt to assess the potential impacts of such a radical regional-scale effort to reduce
high-latitude climate warming. This research enhances interdisciplinary research by integrating natural and
social sciences and including local residents in our research team. These are important steps in effective
inclusion of human-dimensions research in Arctic System Science.
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