آتش سوزی به عنوان یک سرویس اکوسیستم
Supporting services
Provisioning services
Regulating services
Cultural services
Conclusions
References
Humans gain a variety of benefits from the proper func- tioning of natural ecosystems, commonly referred to as “ecosystem services” (MA 2005). Wildfires are a globally important and integral part of many ecosystems, playing key roles in ecosystem dynamics and the retention of species that have evolved in response to fire (Pausas and Keeley 2009). We contend that most wildfires are natural processes that provide a variety of benefits to humankind, and that in wildfiredependent ecosystems, disturbance is manifested by disruptions in the natural fire regime, often when fires are eliminated or the frequency of burning increases (Keeley and Pausas 2019). Although conservation of natural processes should not be strictly tied to their usefulness (Silvertown 2015), it is important to review the services that wildfires provide, given that they are often seen, incorrectly, as destructive disturbances. Fire was certainly used by early hunter–gatherer societies, although there is evidence that the use of fire originated with even earlier hominids (Burton 2011; Gowlett 2016). Ancestral hominids were frequently exposed to fire from the time they moved into open savanna environments more than 2 million years ago. Eventually, humans learned to control fire and it became embedded in human behavior; as such, use of fire may be considered an outgrowth of far older, natural fire regimes (Gowlett 2016). In addition to cooking, as a means of improving the digestibility of plant and animal foods, early human societies used fire for many other purposes, including removal of pests from campsites, provision of heat and light, and for social events (eg bonfires, rituals). Indeed, evening campfires likely played a key role in the development of communication among early humans. Agricultural societies later used fire for deforestation to create farmland and, more recently, for forest management (eg slash-and-burn). Although learning how to use and control fire is considered to be a key step in the evolution of both humans and human societies (Wrangham 2009; Burton 2011), and being a pyrophilic (fire-dependent) species radically changed the ecological niche of humans, most people today have a negative perception of wildfires. We aim to summarize the benefits to humans of living in a flammable world – that is, in a world that experiences recurrent wildfires. The multiple benefits (including direct fitness benefits) of fire use for early humans are not discussed here (see Wrangham 2009; Burton 2011); instead, we focus on wildfires. Prescribed fires are often intended to mimic the benefits of wildfires, so they are also briefly discussed below, but we focus primarily on the benefits of natural (ie historical) wildfire regimes. Perturbations in these fire regimes (eg an exclusion policy, or increase in the frequency or intensity of fires) would feed back to the functioning of the ecosystem and reduce these services in the same way that major anthropogenic changes in a rainfall regime would reduce the services that precipitation provides to humans. We believe that a thorough understanding of the benefits of wildfires requires a framework that describes impacts at the evolutionary scale (at which recurrent fires shape landscapes and the biodiversity they support), as well as at the socioecological scale (at which anthropogenic modifications of fire regimes feed back to humans; Figure 1).