Ecologists continue to debate the role of fire in forests of the southern Appalachian Mountains. How does climate influence fire in these humid, temperate forests? Did fire regimes change during the transition from Native American settlement to Euro-American settlement? Are fire regime changes resulting in broad vegetation changes in the forests of eastern North America? I used several approaches to address these questions. First, I used digitized fire perimeter maps from Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Shenandoah National Park for 1930-2009 to characterize spatial and temporal patterns of wildfire by aspect, elevation, and landform. Results demonstrate that fuel moisture is a primary control, with fire occurring most frequently during dry years, in dry regions, and at dry topographic positions. Climate also modifies topographic control, with weaker topographic patterns under drier conditions. Second, I used dendroecological methods to reconstruct historical fire frequency in yellow pine (Pinus, subgenus Diploxylon Koehne) stands at three field sites in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The fire history reconstructions extend from 1700 to 2009, with composite fire return intervals ranging from 2-4 years prior to the fire protection period. The two longest reconstructions record frequent fire during periods of Native American land use. Except for the recent fire protection period, temporal changes in land use did not have a significant impact on fire frequency and there was little discernible influence of climate on past fire occurrence. Third, I sampled vegetation composition in four different stand types along a topographic moisture gradient, including mesic cove, sub-mesic white pine (Pinus strobus L.) hardwood, sub-xeric oak (Quercus L.), and xeric pine forests in an unlogged watershed with a reconstructed fire history. Stand age structures demonstrate changes in establishment following fire exclusion in xeric pine stands, sub-xeric oak stands, and sub-mesic white pine-hardwood stands. Fire-tolerant yellow pines and oaks are being replaced by shade-tolerant, fire sensitive species such as red maple (Acer rubrum L.) and hemlock (Tsuga canadensis L. Carr.). Classification analysis and ordination of species composition in different age classes suggest a trend of successional convergence in the absence of fire with a shift from four to two forest communities.

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The forests of the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, famous for their extent in antiquity, were described as severely damaged by misuse over the preceding centuries at the time of the British arrival on the island in 1878. The British colonial authorities sought to remedy this "degradation", and their success in doing so before their departure in 1960 has seldom been questioned. This dissertation examines this accepted history of the colonial period by utilizing archival, ethnographic, and physical data and focusing upon the British impact on the landscape as well as the relationship between the British authorities and the Cypriot people. This reappraisal suggests several points. The British approached the Cypriot forests with certain misunderstandings and misconceptions in 1878. They believed that the majority of the forested areas on the island were unregulated commons, which they were not. They further misread the landscape by assuming that its appearance, quite different from that of a humid and temperate biome, indicated degradation. Within these concerns of degradation, they misinterpreted the Cypriot rural economy by holding that shepherds and agriculturalists did not and could not mix. These misunderstandings of Mediterranean ecology, combined with prevailing ideas for good forest management and agricultural intensification, and hampered by inadequate budgets, resulted in policies that did not initially "return" the forests to any imagined state of past verdure, and may instead have been harmful in certain aspects. Yet the British officials did not behave according to traditional stereotypes of colonial rulers either. The actions of many of the colonial foresters were not solely driven by a desire for instant profit; instead the majority consistently attempted to maintain and ameliorate the forests both for indirect ecosystem benefits (which they recognized would be remunerative to the island as a whole, even if not immediately to the department) and direct benefits of timber production. The meticulous records in the archives display a concern with doing what was best for the forests and for the people, which inevitably led to conflicts as to what was "fair" for the forest and "fair" for the inhabitants, however defined. / text

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