Baker's Critique

Baker’s critique was basically about not agreeing with using fire scars as an accurate account of determining fire intervals.  While fire scars can be an effective way to account for fire intervals with today’s technology and information, it is inaccurate for determining fires that were not documented thoroughly in the past.  For instance, this photo shows an area that has been damaged by a high severity fire, and it also shows areas that the fire missed.  If we used fire scars from part of this area, we could guess the length of the fire rotation.  But on the other hand, if we used fire scars from some of those trees that appear to be unaffected in the photo, they would give us the length of the fire rotation from some other point in history that happened prior to this particular fire. 

   

                                           Photo from www.forestryimages.org

I’ve used the same photo as above, but added arrows and fake fire dates to give an example.  Let’s say there was a fire (top right) in 1995, (middle) in 1850, and (bottom) in 2016.  In order to determine the fire intervals based on fire scars accurately, we would need to take examples from trees in all of the areas and not just a one acre plot, or a 100 acre plot.  It leaves too much room for error if someone found a fire scar on some trees in the 1850 range and then took the data for fire scars in the 2016 range because it would look like the fire interval was 166 years.  In actuality, the mean fire interval is 55.3.  

Also, there is no way of knowing if a fire was a high severity fire or low intensity fire based on fire scar data.  Fire scars only show that a fire burned that tree, and not necessarily that entire area.