Taking Fire Science and Practice to the Next Level: Report from the PAGES Global Paleofire Working Group Workshop 2017 in Montreal, Canada – Paleofire Knowledge for Current and Future Ecosystem Management
Résumé
This report summarizes the outcome of the PAGES Global Paleofire Working Group workshop 2017 that took place in Montreal, Canada – Paleofire knowledge for current and future ecosystem management. The workshop aimed to (1) discuss the importance of past fire or paleofire research, focused on long-term influence of fire on the environments worldwide, in nature conservation, (2) find ways to integrate scientific achievements of paleofire research into ecosystem management practices, and (3) start the dialogue with ecosystem managers, practitioners and policymakers (EMPPs). With this report, the members of the Global Paleofire Working Group would like to open a discussion about how igniting new collaborations with EMPPs and make paleofire data useful for fire risk management. We recognized four main challenges in communication and cooperation between scientists and EMPPs: little awareness of EMPPs about paleofire research, differences in professional language used in an operational context by scientists and EMPPs, scientific data availability, and costs of paleoecological expertise. Moreover, we indicate the way to improve the communication between scientists and EMPPs by proposing a scheme of cooperation between both groups. We want to encourage researchers working in various fields of paleoecology to open up for the cooperation with EMPPs in the future, especially helping to create ecosystem management plans, because paleoecological data carry important information about the evolution of ecosystems that is vital in the context of global change.
