Global Pyrogeography: the Current and Future Distribution of Wildfire

By M. Krawchuk, M. Moritz, Marc-André Parisien, Jeff Van Dorn, Katharine Hayhoe. PLoS ONE, 2009

934 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change is expected to alter the geographic distribution of wildfire, a complex abiotic process that responds to a variety of spatial and environmental gradients. How future climate change may alter global wildfire activity, however, is still largely unknown. As a first step to quantifying potential change in global wildfire, we present a multivariate quantification of environmental drivers for the observed, current distribution of vegetation fires using statistical models of the relationship between fire activity and resources to burn, climate conditions, human influence, and lightning flash rates at a coarse spatiotemporal resolution (100 km, over one decade). We then demonstrate how these statistical models can be used to project future changes in global fire patterns, highlighting regional hotspots of change in fire probabilities under future climate conditions as simulated by a global climate model. Based on current conditions, our results illustrate how the availability of resources to burn and climate conditions conducive to combustion jointly determine why some parts of the world are fire-prone and others are fire-free. In contrast to any expectation that global warming should necessarily result in more fire, we find that regional increases in fire probabilities may be counter-balanced by decreases at other locations, due to the interplay of temperature and precipitation variables. Despite this net balance, our models predict substantial invasion and retreat of fire across large portions of the globe. These changes could have important effects on terrestrial ecosystems since alteration in fire activity may occur quite rapidly, generating ever more complex environmental challenges for species dispersing and adjusting to new climate conditions. Our findings highlight the potential for widespread impacts of climate change on wildfire, suggesting severely altered fire regimes and the need for more explicit inclusion of fire in research on global vegetation-climate change dynamics and conservation planning.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e416f067e43e6d89e9ee538969b0a23c211a1b5d

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Citations in the corpus

Integration of ecological and socio-economic factors to assess global vulnerability to wildfire (2014, background): “Current climate projections estimate more extreme fire weather conditions in the next decades for most tropical and boreal regions (Krawchuk et al., 2009), while recent modelling exercises point towards an increase in carbon emissions, which will be between 17 and 62% larger than present-day values ”
Driving forces of global wildfires over the past millennium and the forthcoming century (2010, background): “, the enhancement of the extant tropical-subtropical precipitation pattern (22) and the strengthening of the Northern Annular Mode (23)].”
High-severity fire: evaluating its key drivers and mapping its probability across western US forests (2018, background): “…normals) is an important factor driving fire severity (Parks et al 2014c, Kane et al 2015a), although many suggest that climate likely has an indirect influence via its effect on productivity and dominant vegetation type (e.g. Miller and Urban 1999a, Pausas and Bradstock 2007, Krawchuk et al 2009).”
Wildfire Prediction to Inform Fire Management: Statistical Science Challenges (2013, methodology): “Krawchuk et al. (2009) investigated spatio-temporal patterns in fire activity in a global sense, by modeling on a coarser 100-km (10,000 km2) × decadal scale.”
The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth (2011, background): “Several modelling studies have shown that increasing global temperatures could lead to increases in fire occurrence in some areas of the globe, but to decreases in others (Scholze et al., 2006; Krawchuk et al., 2009; Pechony & Shindell, 2010).”
Characteristics of climate change refugia for Australian biodiversity (2014, background): “, Watts M. et al. (2009) Incorporating ecological and evolutionary processes into continental-scale conservation planning.”
Biological and geophysical feedbacks with fire in the Earth system (2018, background): “Current global predictive models of fire tend towards unidimensional indices of vegetation— e.g. net primary productivity (NPP)—or none at all (Krawchuk et al 2009, Moritz et al 2012, Spracklen et al 2009), although models linked to DGVMs can define fuels more precisely (Page and Morton 2014,…”
Bark thickness and fire regime (2015, background): “Fire-prone ecosystems (also termed flammable or pyrophilic ecosystems) cover a large proportion of the world (Bond, Woodward & Midgley 2005; Krawchuk et al. 2009).”
Quaternary palaeoecology and nature conservation: a general review with examples from the neotropics (2011, background): “Non-linear responses and spatially heterogeneous fire patterns should be considered to predict future ecological scenarios (Cochrane and Barber, 2009; Flannigan et al., 2009; Krawchuk et al., 2009).”
The spatially varying influence of humans on fire probability in North America (2016, background): “While many large-scale wildland fire studies may include a single variable describing anthropogenic impacts on fire (e.g., Krawchuk et al 2009, Bistinas et al 2013), we included three conceptually different variables to capture varying aspects of the fire– human relationship.”
Disturbance refugia within mosaics of forest fire, drought, and insect outbreaks (2020, background): “Recent global- scale research on forest disturbances emphasizes the widespread nature of fire (Krawchuk et al. 2009), drought (Allen et al. 2010), and insect outbreaks (van Lierop et al. 2015), as well as forest harvest, land conversion, and other disturbance agents (Hansen et al. 2013).”
The geography of climate change: implications for conservation biogeography (2010, neutral): “Krawchuk et al. , 2009).”
Ecology and evolution of pine life histories (2012, background): “Indeed, on contemporary landscapes, mires, and the inertinite fire signal, comprise only a few percent of the land surface compared to contemporary fire-prone environments that occupy over half of the land surface (Krawchuk et al. 2009).”