127
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Global Pyrogeography: the Current and Future Distribution of Wildfire

      research-article

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          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.

          Related collections

          Most cited references102

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Book: not found

          Applied Logistic Regression

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Book: not found

            R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Fire science for rainforests.

              Forest fires are growing in size and frequency across the tropics. Continually eroding fragmented forest edges, they are unintended ecological disturbances that transcend deforestation to degrade vast regions of standing forest, diminishing ecosystem services and the economic potential of these natural resources. Affecting the health of millions, net forest fire emissions may have released carbon equivalent to 41% of worldwide fossil fuel use in 1997-98. Episodically more severe during El Niño events, pan-tropical forest fires will increase as more damaged, less fire-resistant, forests cover the landscape. Here I discuss the current state of tropical fire science and make recommendations for advancement.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2009
                8 April 2009
                : 4
                : 4
                : e5102
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America
                [2 ]Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
                [3 ]ATMOS Research and Consulting, Lubbock, Texas, United States of America
                [4 ]Department of Geosciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, United States of America
                Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
                Author notes

                Conceived and designed the experiments: MAK MAM MAP. Analyzed the data: MAK JVD KH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MAK MAM JVD KH. Wrote the paper: MAK MAM MAP KH.

                Article
                08-PONE-RA-07808R1
                10.1371/journal.pone.0005102
                2662419
                19352494
                e644af9d-1783-4539-9743-a16ebb8ad565
                Krawchuk et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 10 December 2008
                : 25 February 2009
                Page count
                Pages: 12
                Categories
                Research Article
                Ecology/Ecosystem Ecology
                Ecology/Global Change Ecology
                Ecology/Spatial and Landscape Ecology

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article