WildFIRE PIRE Research in New Zealand

New Zealand offers a unique opportunity to study wildfire in temperate rainforest and subalpine ecosystems that have experienced relatively low fire activity for much of the Holocene, but are now facing increasing fire risk due to climate change and human activity.

Why New Zealand?

The contrast between New Zealand’s historically low-fire landscapes and the more fire-prone regions of Australia, the Western United States, and Patagonia allows the project to test fundamental hypotheses about the controls on fire regimes across a wide range of climatic and vegetation conditions.

Research Focus Areas

In New Zealand, the project will:

• Reconstruct fire activity over the past 10,000+ years using lake-sediment charcoal and pollen records
• Develop high-resolution tree-ring and sediment-based fire histories
• Examine interactions between climate, vegetation, and human (Māori and European) fire use
• Quantify vegetation-fire-soil feedbacks in temperate forest and alpine environments
• Project future wildfire behavior under changing climate scenarios

Study Sites

• Multiple watersheds across the South Island representing different vegetation types and climatic gradients
• Complementary sites in the North Island where appropriate

Broader Context

This research complements parallel studies in:

• Western United States
• Australia
• Patagonia

View the full Science Plan
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Related Categories
All Research pages | All Project pages | All Wildfire studies

Tags
NSF | PIRE | New Zealand | Fire History | Paleoecology | Soil Erosion Control | Climate Change

This page is faithfully restored from the 2013–2015 historical archives of wildfirepire.org. Content originates from the NSF-funded WildFIRE PIRE Science Plan and remains in the public domain.