How contemporary bioclimatic and human controls change global fire regimes

Douglas I. Kelley*, Ioannis Bistinas, Rhys Whitley, Chantelle Burton, Toby R. Marthews, Ning Dong

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalLetterpeer-review

    95 Citations (Scopus)
    28 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Anthropogenically driven declines in tropical savannah burnt area1,2 have recently received attention due to their effect on trends in global burnt area3,4. Large-scale trends in ecosystems where vegetation has adapted to infrequent fire, especially in cooler and wetter forested areas, are less well understood. Here, small changes in fire regimes can have a substantial impact on local biogeochemistry5. To investigate trends in fire across a wide range of ecosystems, we used Bayesian inference6 to quantify four primary controls on burnt area: fuel continuity, fuel moisture, ignitions and anthropogenic suppression. We found that fuel continuity and moisture are the dominant limiting factors of burnt area globally. Suppression is most important in cropland areas, whereas savannahs and boreal forests are most sensitive to ignitions. We quantify fire regime shifts in areas with more than one, and often counteracting, trends in these controls. Forests are of particular concern, where we show average shifts in controls of 2.3–2.6% of their potential maximum per year, mainly driven by trends in fuel continuity and moisture. This study gives added importance to understanding long-term future changes in the controls on fire and the effect of fire trends on ecosystem function.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)690-696
    Number of pages7
    JournalNature Climate Change
    Volume9
    Issue number9
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Sept 2019

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