Earth system scientists at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Rebecca Scholten and Sander Veraverbeke, and the University of California (UCI), Irvine, used satellite data from 2012 to the present to develop a wildfire atlas. The atlas could help fire managers understand which areas are most at risk from intensifying fire activity in a warming climate.
Human influence
“Our system tracks Arctic-boreal wildfires throughout their lifetime at 12-hourly time steps,” said Rebecca Scholten, an earth scientist and lead author of the new Nature Geoscience study. The study is part of her PhD research at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In the coming year, she will conduct research at the University of California with a Rubicon grant.
“What’s really nice about it is it can tell you something about wildfire regimes and their sensitivity to climate change.” Specifically, the team can assess the degree to which nearby human populations influence the number of wildfires and their size and severity, as well as how different plant types shape such fire regime properties. “We found stark differences between human-dominated regions and wilderness areas,” said Scholten, who added that, depending on local fire regulations in a specific area, humans can increase or attenuate fire activity.
Value for fire management
Scholten and her team used their fire atlas to identify seven distinct Arctic-boreal “pyro regions”, each with their own unique characteristics, with the aim of identifying high-risk fire regions. “We can see a very large variability in fire regimes driven by human and environmental factors, and my hope is this translates to value for fire management,” Scholten said. The team found that remote areas of eastern Siberia and Canada appear more likely to contribute to biome-wide extreme fire years than other boreal forest regions in Europe and southern Siberia. Fire management can therefore be better designed with this new information.