In their paper entitled “Wildfires as an ecosystem
service”, Pausas and Keeley (2019)
summarize the benefits generated by – as
well as the evolutionary and socioecological
importance of – wildfires for humankind.
Although we recognize the importance of
wildfires in such a context, we argue that
presenting wildfire per se as an ecosystem
service is conceptually incorrect and can be
misleading for policy makers and resource
managers. Throughout their paper, the
authors repeatedly refer to (wild)fire as a
potential provider of multiple ecosystem
services (and not as an ecosystem service
itself, as indicated in their article’s title). We
believe that this is more than a dispute over
semantics, for such a contradiction could
lead to misperceptions about the definition
of the term “
ecosystem services”, which is
especially concerning in light of its real-world
applications to fire management.
ÂS received support from the Portuguese
Foundation for Science and Technology
(FCT) through PhD grant SFRH/BD/
132838/2017, funded by the Ministry
of Science, Technology and Higher
Education, and by the European Social
Fund–Operational Program Human
Capital within the 2014–2020 EU
Strategic Framework. AR is funded by
Xunta de Galicia (post-doctoral
fellowship
ED481B2016/084-0).
This research
was developed as part of the project
FirESmart (PCIF/MOG/0083/2017), which
received funding from the FCT. The
authors declare that they have no conflicts
of interest.
