Unfortunately, accurate reconstruction of events that contributed to historical changes in vegetation (including interruption of fire regimes) will not necessarily facilitate contemporary management,and rarely will engender restoration of presettlement conditions. Pervasive and profound changes have occurred in the biological and physical environments during the last century or more (e.g., dominance of many sites by nonnative species, altered levels of livestock grazing, increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations).
As a result, simply reintroducing periodic fires into areas in which fires formerly occurred will not produce ecosystems that closely resemble those found before Anglo settlement; in this case,understanding the past will not ensure that we can predict the
future, and a detailed understanding of past conditions may impede contemporary management by lending a false sense of security to predictions based on retrospection. Rather, recurrent fires in these “new” systems may enhance the spread of nonnative
species and ultimately cause native biological diversity to decline.