Lessons from a century of evidence-based fire management in grassy ecosystems

Since prehistory, fire has been influential as an ecosystem process and has been used by people as a tool to support livelihoods and maintain landscapes worldwide. This is especially true in grassy ecosystems, where landscapes and ecological systems are fire-adapted and fire-dependent and where, even today, people are reliant on fire to manage resources (e.g. grazing areas and important food plants). Currently, global attitudes towards fire and the use thereof are shaped by the impacts of fire in forests, resulting in flawed negative perspectives of the impacts and role of fire in grasslands. The environment in which we manage fire is also changing, climatically, politically, socially, and economically, at scales ranging from local to regional to global, with the potential to alter essential fire regimes that support biodiversity, ecosystem services, and people’s livelihoods. Understanding and managing fire to support both the social and ecological dynamics presents a formidable challenge. In Southern africa, the first formal scientific investigations of fire started in the early 1900s. although learning was common practice among traditional land managers, prevailing perceptions of fire in grassy ecosystems among European colonists and scientists were negative. Ecologists from this era (e.g. John William bews and John fV Philips) questioned prevailing negative attitudes, calling for more empirical and experimental investigations into fire impacts and behaviour. These efforts helped grow generations of fire ecologists, foster interactions among scientists, managers, and local communities, and raised important questions about whether the scientific approach complements or undermines indigenous knowledge and practices. One hundred years after the first scientific studies on fire impacts in southern africa were published, it is time to both celebrate and critically assess our current understanding and progress. Information from fire experiments offer a strong foundation for evidence-based fire management, with increasing emphasis on incorporating indigenous and traditional fire management practices that have been shown to reduce fire risk and carbon emissions and increase fire safety, while also promoting fire-dependent ecosystem processes and services. In this Special Issue, we include diverse perspectives that examine the evidence from ecological and social disciplines on fire management in grassy ecosystems across the world. More than a century of fire experiments and applied fire management and suppression, together with modern technological advances in fire detection, mappings and monitoring, offer a strong foundation for evidence-based fire management.