why we can’t ‘just’ split big forests into multiple blocks so when a block burns it doesn’t spread through the whole forest.

Question

Well the title is the question.
With ‘split’ I mean create some space between blocks where fire has nothing to travel to the next block to spread.

I imagine that actions like dropping water with helicopters would also be unnecessary since we could ‘give up’ a burning block and then the fire would be over.

Or am I too naive about it?

In: Earth Science

Answer 1

Everyone has already mentioned fire breaks, but there is a little bit more too it. Even something as seemingly simple as a small gap in the forest often needs to be heavily assessed to ensure it isn’t damaging to protected species. Habitat fragmentation can cause a lot of issues, especially for large predators, and chopping up a forest could potentially do a lot more harm for what lives there than we expect.