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Fires
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3.6. Fires
Fires are among the most decisive factors having a substantial, sometimes devastating impact on forest and wetland ecosystems. Depending on the weather conditions during the vegetation season, 28.5 thousand fires are registered annually in the three riparian countries’ forest reserve. The area affected by fires causing a dramatic damage to biotic complexes varies from 1,450 (in 2000) to 21,550 (in 1992) hectares.
The research conducted within the project framework in the Belorussian part of the Dnipro Basin in 2002 showed that the problem of forest fires is especially pressing for dried and abandoned peat mines. Their forest-growing conditions are unfavorable and forest recovery is a rare practice. In drought-affected years they often blaze up causing numerous environmental and economic problems. Peat land fires are difficult to extinguish. Very often, the most feasible way to use this category of lands is their secondary swamping or transformation into wetlands. This option would be beneficial for biological and landscape diversity and, at the same time, conducive to the decreasing release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Fires result in the death of plants and animals, destruction of soil organics, interruption of the natural progress of plant successions. However, fires have some positive impact as well. They create conditions for the development of a fairly large group of animals and plants – pyrophytes whose population require fire impact for their development. Besides, fires are necessary for the development of a group of plant communities, in particular native pine forests on mineral soils with medium moisture content. Finally, forest fire-sites constitute another component of landscape and biotope diversity.
Nevertheless, adverse impacts of forest fires prevail in the basin. The Dnipro Basin areas affected by fires are sufficient for the development of species whose lifecycle is dependent on fires. On the average, about 4,900 forest fires occur on the area of 5,300 hectares every year. Given that some fires are not registered by official statistics, especially in the forests belonging to agricultural and defense enterprises, fire-sites of various ages are not a rare type of forest biotopes.
