Topographic and fire weather controls of fire refugia in forested ecosystems of northwestern North America

By M. Krawchuk, Sandra L. Haire, J. Coop, Marc-André Parisien, Ellen Whitman, Geneva W. Chong, Carol Miller. 2016

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fire refugia, sometimes referred to as fire islands, shadows, skips, residuals, or fire remnants, are an important element of the burn mosaic, but we lack a quantitative framework that links observations of fire refugia from different environmental contexts. Here, we develop and test a conceptual model for how predictability of fire refugia varies according to topographic complexity and fire weather conditions. Refugia were quantified as areas unburned or burned at comparatively low severity based on remotely sensed burn severity data. We assessed the relationship between refugia and a suite of terrain-related explanatory metrics by fitting a collection of boosted regression tree models. The models were developed for seven study fires that burned in conifer-dominated forested landscapes of the Western Cordillera of Canada between 2001 and 2014. We fit nine models, each for distinct levels of fire weather and terrain ruggedness. Our framework revealed that the predictability and abundance of fire refugia varied among these environmental settings. We observed highest predictability under moderate fire weather conditions and moderate terrain ruggedness (ROC-AUC = 0.77), and lowest predictability in flatter landscapes and under high fire weather conditions (ROC-AUC = 0.63–0.68). Catchment slope, local aspect, relative position, topographic wetness, topographic convergence, and local slope all contributed to discriminating where refugia occur but the relative importance of these topographic controls differed among environments. Our framework allows us to characterize the predictability of contemporary fire refugia across multiple environmental settings and provides important insights for ecosystem resilience, wildfire management, conservation planning, and climate change adaptation.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/029016933be2f99c7923d0aaad2296cf80c06471

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In Ecology

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Climate‐change refugia in boreal North America: what, where, and for how long? (2020, background): “Shelter from wind and shade from solar radiation influence microclimate and forest structure, as well as fire ignition and spread potential (Krawchuk et al. 2016).”
Disturbance refugia within mosaics of forest fire, drought, and insect outbreaks (2020, methodology): “2018b), observed relationships among climate metrics, weather, and refugia patterns suggest a reduction in fire refugia in future climates (Kolden et al. 2015; Krawchuk et al. 2016).”