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
Others have made good points that maintaining such a network of fire breaks would be expensive and resource-intensive.
Dividing forest habitat like this also creates what are known as *edge effects*, which can be ecologically devastating for some species. Many large animal and tree species require large tracts of dense forest to thrive. These forest edges create small, but potentially critical differences in climate and environment that can be detrimental to those “deep forest” species: for example, light, wind, and temperature can enter the forest horizontally, new species can establish themselves along the new edges and start to encroach into the forest and outcompete established species, and the breaks can hinder migration throughout the forest.
Lastly, fire is quite a beneficial process in many of Earth’s ecosystems. Humans have managed landscapes in a healthy way via fire for millennia. Over the last couple centuries, imported colonial forest management theories have called for an unhealthy level of fire suppression. As a result, fires in recent decades have been far more intense than they have been historically. Additionally, drought events are occurring with greater frequency, causing more frequent and intense fires than probably occurred historically, at least in North America.
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