Fire suppression has been an official management policy in a variety of Northern Ghana ecosystems. Discuss examples of how this has impacted community composition. Describe how these examples are either consistent or inconsistent with the predictions of the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis. Be sure to take into account various aspects of the disturbance regime (e. G. Frequency and intensity).

The answer to these questions are the following:  

1. It has been suggested that fire suppression management might increase the area affected by increasing the frequency of high-severity fires in the Idaho-Montana Rockies (USA) and in the chaparral vegetation of California

2. Fire suppression>> alteration of composition, distribution, and density of species

3. Data are consistent with the intermediate disturbance hypothesis  

Fire suppression management is a strategy focused on trying to stop wildfires. The fire suppression management strategy has recently been criticized for accumulating dead biomass in fire-prone ecosystems, thereby leading to high intensity and high severity fires when these areas do burn with wildfire. It has been shown that fire suppression may negatively alter the composition, distribution, and density of species (both animals and plants), especially in ecosystems having high-frequency and low-intensity fires.  

In the Idaho-Montana Rockies (USA), it has been shown that high-severity fires increased their frequency in the period from 1975 to 2012 than in the period from 1935 to 1974, when the fire suppression management strategy coincided simultaneously with cooler and moister conditions that were conducive to them.

The intermediate disturbance hypothesis states that species diversity is maximized at intermediate-scale disturbances. There are many ecologists that disagree with this hypothesis, indicating that the association between ecological disturbance and species diversity does not follow a unimodal distribution. In the example of the Idaho-Montana Rockies, data are consistent with the intermediate disturbance hypothesis because the intermediate disturbance hypothesis indicates that species diversity is highest in areas that have had an intermediate frequency and scale of disturbances (i.e., a fire suppression strategy might decrease the frequency of wildfires but it increases the risk of high severity fires).

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