Impact of Fire on Secondary Forest Succession in a Sub-Tropical Landscape

Abstract

In Hong Kong, as in many tropical areas, grasslands are maintained by fire on disturbed and abandoned land. However, Hong Kong’s native forests are regenerating in many areas, alongside frequent burning of the hillsides, and are in different stages of structural succession to closed canopy forest patches. Understanding the major determinants of secondary succession is a vital input to forest management policies, Given the importance of forests for biodiversity conservation, watershed protection and carbon cycling. This study examines the relationship between burning regimes and structural forest succession over 42 years from 1973 to 2015, using an archive of satellite images, aerial photographs and field plot data. Overlay of a fire frequency map with maps of forest structural classes at different dates indicates the number of fires undergone by each successional class as well as the time taken to progress from one class to another under different fire regimes. Results indicate that the native sub-tropical evergreen forests, which are naturally fire intolerant, can regenerate alongside moderate burning, and once the shrub stage is reached, succession to closed forest is relatively rapid and can occur within 13 years. More than one burn, however, is more destructive, and twice-burnt areas were seen to have only one-third of the woody biomass of once-burnt plots. The most frequent fires occurred in areas where mono-cultural plantations had been destroyed by disease in the 1960s and were subsequently invaded by grasslands. These former plantation areas remained in early successional stages of grass and open shrubland by 2015. Other plantations from the 1970s and 1980s remain as plantations today and have acted as a barrier to natural forest succession, attesting to the greater effectiveness of fire control over re-afforestation measures.