165 7.1 Introduction Analysis of historical fire patterns of severity provides a view of fire regimes before they were altered by contemporary forest management practices such as logging, road-building, grazing, and fire suppression. Historical fire data can place contempo- rary observed fire data in a longer temporal context, and establish prior likelihoods to test outputs from predictive fire behavior and forest vegetation simulation models. When integrated with biophysical and remote-sensing data, fire-history data have been modeled to create both coarse scale (1 km 2 , Schmidt et al. 2002) and fine scale (30 m 2 , Rollins and Frame 2006) maps of fire regimes for the contiguous United States (LANDFIRE 2007). When joined with analysis of contemporary fires, the spatial properties of historical fires can provide a valuable perspective for fire and fuel management decisions (Schmidt et al. 2002). For these and other reasons, spatial reconstruction of historical fires is of both scientific and management interest. The guiding scientific motivations for reconstructing landscape-scale spatio- temporal properties of fires include interests in: Reconstructing previously unrecorded fires, including perimeter estimates and •฀ internal patterns of heterogeneity in burn severity. By estimating the size and pattern of historical fires we can compare historical landscape-scale effects to modern fires at a given location. These site-specific reconstructions can help local managers improve fire management strategies. Estimating properties of fire regimes, such as fire frequency, fire-size distribu- •฀ tion and fire rotation. Correlating landscape to regional spatiotemporal patterns of fire occurrence with •฀ other observations (proxy and instrumental), especially in relation to climate. By comparing the periodicity of historical fires to climate variability we may T. Swetnam (*) School of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0001, USA e-mail: tswetnam@gmail.com Chapter 7 Reconstructing Landscape Pattern of Historical Fires and Fire Regimes Tyson Swetnam, Donald A. Falk, Amy E. Hessl, and Calvin Farris D. McKenzie et al. (eds.), The Landscape Ecology of Fire, Ecological Studies 213, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0301-8_7, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011