wildfire regimes
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Author(s):  
Sandy P Harrison ◽  
Iain Colin Prentice ◽  
Keith J Bloomfield ◽  
Ning Dong ◽  
Matthias Forkel ◽  
...  

Abstract Recent extreme wildfire seasons in several regions have been associated with exceptionally hot, dry conditions, made more probable by climate change. Much research has focused on extreme fire weather and its drivers, but natural wildfire regimes – and their interactions with human activities – are far from being comprehensively understood. There is a lack of clarity about the ‘causes’ of wildfire, and about how ecosystems could be managed for the co-existence of wildfire and people. We present evidence supporting an ecosystem-centred framework for improved understanding and modelling of wildfire. Wildfire has a long geological history and is a pervasive natural process in contemporary plant communities. In some biomes, wildfire would be more frequent without human settlement; in others they would be unchanged or less frequent. A world without fire would have greater forest cover, especially in present-day savannas. Many species would be missing, because fire regimes have co-evolved with plant traits that resist, adapt to or promote wildfire. Certain plant traits are favoured by different fire frequencies, and may be missing in ecosystems that are normally fire-free. For example, post-fire resprouting is more common among woody plants in high-frequency fire regimes than where fire is infrequent. The impact of habitat fragmentation on wildfire crucially depends on whether the ecosystem is fire-adapted. In normally fire-free ecosystems, fragmentation facilitates wildfire starts and is detrimental to biodiversity. In fire-adapted ecosystems, fragmentation inhibits fires from spreading and fire suppression is detrimental to biodiversity. This interpretation explains observed, counterintuitive patterns of spatial correlation between wildfire and potential ignition sources. Lightning correlates positively with burnt area only in open ecosystems with frequent fire. Human population correlates positively with burnt area only in densely forested regions. Models for vegetation-fire interactions must be informed by insights from fire ecology to make credible future projections in a changing climate.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henriette I. Jager ◽  
Jonathan W. Long ◽  
Rachel L. Malison ◽  
Brendan P. Murphy ◽  
Ashley Rust ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
François-Nicolas Robinne ◽  
Catherine Paquette ◽  
Dennis Hallema ◽  
Kevin D. Bladon ◽  
Marc Parisien

As the pressures on water supply from shifting forest disturbance regimes continue to escalate, researchers are being asked to answer increasingly complex questions. However, many questions in wildfire-watershed risk (WWR) research remained unaddressed due to a paucity of relevant datasets. There are, indeed, many fundamental processes we do not understand that require additional data collection to develop risk management frameworks. As such, WWR researchers and managers face a paradox in their need to address critical questions important for the sustainability of socio-hydrological systems while dealing with incomplete information. In many cases, this leads to valuable research ideas being discarded on the account of limited data availability. However, imperfect, incomplete, or limited data should not deter researchers and managers from performing analyses to assess risk. In fact, such analyses improve the research benefit-to-cost ratio of existing data, help unravel gaps in data sources, enable generation of new hypotheses, and highlight where data availability and openness can be improved. If we do not use what we have, how can we know what we need? This issue is of particular interest in Canada, where baseline WWR information for the entire country is generally missing, despite growing concerns about water security in the face of a shifting wildfire regimes. In this commentary, we (a) identify several relevant open geospatial datasets, (b) illustrate how these datasets can be leveraged to produce simple yet relevant risk information, (c) identify some high priority data gaps that require immediate attention, and (d) discuss future avenues towards the creation of baseline Pan-Canadian WWR information.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vachel A. Carter ◽  
Andrea Brunelle ◽  
Mitchell J. Power ◽  
R. Justin DeRose ◽  
Matthew F. Bekker ◽  
...  

AbstractClimatic conditions exert an important influence on wildfire activity in the western United States; however, Indigenous farming activity may have also shaped the local fire regimes for millennia. The Fish Lake Plateau is located on the Great Basin–Colorado Plateau boundary, the only region in western North America where maize farming was adopted then suddenly abandoned. Here we integrate sedimentary archives, tree rings, and archeological data to reconstruct the past 1200 years of fire, climate, and human activity. We identify a period of high fire activity during the apex of prehistoric farming between 900 and 1400 CE, and suggest that farming likely obscured the role of climate on the fire regime through the use of frequent low-severity burning. Climatic conditions again became the dominant driver of wildfire when prehistoric populations abandoned farming around 1400 CE. We conclude that Indigenous populations shaped high-elevation mixed-conifer fire regimes on the Fish Lake Plateau through land-use practices.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Smith ◽  
Jessica McCarty ◽  
Merritt Turetsky ◽  
Mark Parrington

<p>MODIS has provided an 18-year continuous record of global fire activity. Here we present a geospatial analysis of MODIS hotspots in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere from 2003 through to 2020. By combining the hotspot data with multiple land-cover datasets relating to vegetation cover, permafrost, and peat, we investigate boreal and tundra wildfire regimes, including an assessment of a significant northwards shift and increase in fire activity in 2019 and 2020. We focus on the distribution of hotspots on high latitude peatlands and permafrost and the associated difficulties in confirming residual smouldering compustion of peat soils using current remote sensing technology.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 593 ◽  
pp. 125808
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Rakhmatulina ◽  
Gabrielle Boisramé ◽  
Scott L. Stephens ◽  
Sally Thompson

Author(s):  
Erin J. Hanan ◽  
Jianning Ren ◽  
Christina L. Tague ◽  
Crystal A. Kolden ◽  
John T. Abatzoglou ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Rebecca Abney ◽  
Qin Ma

Anthropogenic climate change is projected to impact a significant proportion of ecosystems throughout the world. These shifts in climate are already impacting a diversity of wildland and urban ecosystems, and they are projected to increase wildfire frequency and severity in many regions. This projected increase is the result of the interaction of altered drought, precipitation, and temperature regimes. Understanding shifts in wildfire regimes is critical for managers at the wildland-urban interface that work to protect structures and human life. This chapter will explore how ongoing and future shifts in climate will drive alterations to natural fire regimes in the United States, with focus on implications for the wildland-urban interface.


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