In temperate regions, feeding livestock year round on pasture is usually limited by weather conditions and livestock must be fed hay, or other stored feeds, at least part of the year when pasture forage runs out. On many farms, hay must be fed during winter and hay feeding is typically confined to pastures that are sacrificed for this purpose. The concentrated use of pasture during winter hay feeding could negatively impact subsequent forage production from soil compaction and possibly create water quality degradation from manure runoff.

Wildfires represent an important agent of land degradation in temperate sub-humid ecosystems, including southern European Mediterranean countries. Identification of integrated conservation approaches that can reduce or prevent degradational impacts is the aim of the EU-funded DESIRE research program, part of which is concerned with quantifying the likely benefit of acceptable alternative conservation strategies to wildfire.

On the dry, flat, jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.)-dominated ecosystems of the northern Lake States and eastern Canada, wildfire behavior often produces narrow, remnant strips of unburned trees that provide heterogeneity on a landscape historically shaped by stand-replacing wildfires. We used landscape metrics to analyze a chronosequence of aerial imagery to examine these “stringers” of mature trees within historical wildfires in northern Lower Michigan.