Simulating the effects of fire management on gas emissions in western forests of the United States

The exclusion of fire from terrestrial ecosystems will result in major changes in landscape structure and composition that, in turn, will result in significant changes in gaseous emissions to the atmosphere. A mechanistic forest successional model, FIRE-BGC (a FIRE BioGeoChemical succession model) is used to investigate long-term trends in gaseous emissions (CO{sub 2}, CO, CH{sub 4}, non-methane hydrocarbons, and NO{sub x}) under present and historical fire regimes for a complex landscape in Glacier National Park, Montana, USA. FIRE-BGC simulates long-term fire and stand dynamics on coniferous forest landscapes of the northern Rocky Mountains. FIRE-BGC is an individual tree model created by merging the gap-phase, process-based model FIRESUM with the mechanistic ecosystem biogeochemical model FOREST-BGC.