Animals other than people can also have tremendous impact on structure. Termites build mounds, elephants move through vegetation like bulldozers, prairie dogs once created huge colonies in North America that had much different vegetation than neighboring plains. Fires create vegetation mosaics Fire rarely burns huge uninterrupted swaths across the landscape. Instead, fires leap around, leaving a mosaic of burned and unburned vegetation. Among the concerns raised by fire suppression is that fire suppression changes the pattern of burning when fires eventually do happen.
Fire suppression tends to cause a build-up of flammable material.
Fires might not only burn hotter in areas of long-practiced fire suppression, there is evidence that they leave less of a mosaic of burned and unburned patches and more of a complete burn. Beavers Beavers deserve a section to themselves because they once had a huge impact on the North American landscape that is hard to imagine now. In pre-European days, the North American beaver population numbered an estimated 60 to 400 million individuals. That is close to the human population of the US today, except that the beavers weren't concentrated in cities. They were spread all over the landscape in virtually every river and stream, doing their busy beaver thing.