Transferring landscape ecological knowledge in a multipartner landscape: The border lakes region of Minnesota and Ontario

Abstract

The Border Lakes landscape of northeastern Minnesota, United States, and northwestern Ontario, Canada, is dominated by a few major, fire-dependent forest ecosystems, and is owned and managed primarily by government agencies with complex hierarchical structures. The Border Lakes Partnership was created to address direct threats to these ecosystems resulting from the severely altered fire regimes in this 2-million-ha, multiple-owner landscape. Following nearly a century of fire suppression, the fire regime of the Border Lakes landscape has been highly altered from its historical range, and the risk of loss of key ecosystem components is high as a result. The fire regime has departed from its historical frequency (an average return interval of 35 to 100 years) to become a regime with multiple return intervals, and dramatic changes in fire size, intensity, severity, and pattern have also occurred (RMRS 1999). Consequently, the plant species composition and the structure of the forest and other ecosystems have shifted substantially. Without the reintroduction of an ecologically appropriate fire regime or a surrogate management practice that emulates that regime, the jack pine-dominated forest ecosystem, a major part of this landscape, may largely disappear from the Border Lakes landscape in the next 50 to 150 years (Heinselman 1973; Paul Tiné, retired, USDA Forest Service, Superior National Forest, personal communication) and others will continue to be highly altered. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. All rights reserved.