Fire-climate interactions in the American West since 1400 CE

Valerie Trouet; Alan H. Taylor; Eugene R. Wahl; Carl N. Skinner; Scott L. Stephens

doi:10.1029/2009gl041695

Fire-climate interactions in the American West since 1400 CE

Geophysical Research Letters ◽

10.1029/2009gl041695 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 37 (4) ◽

Cited By ~ 54

Author(s):

Valerie Trouet ◽

Alan H. Taylor ◽

Eugene R. Wahl ◽

Carl N. Skinner ◽

Scott L. Stephens

Keyword(s):

American West ◽

Climate Interactions ◽

Fire Climate Interactions

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Improving prediction and assessment of global fires using multilayer neural networks

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-81233-4 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Jaideep Joshi ◽

Raman Sukumar

Keyword(s):

Global Climate ◽

Grid Cell ◽

Temporal Correlation ◽

Environmental Drivers ◽

Future Climate Change ◽

Burned Area ◽

Climate Change Scenarios ◽

Data Driven Approach ◽

Climate Interactions ◽

Fire Climate Interactions

AbstractFires determine vegetation patterns, impact human societies, and are a part of complex feedbacks into the global climate system. Empirical and process-based models differ in their scale and mechanistic assumptions, giving divergent predictions of fire drivers and extent. Although humans have historically used and managed fires, the current role of anthropogenic drivers of fires remains less quantified. Whereas patterns in fire–climate interactions are consistent across the globe, fire–human–vegetation relationships vary strongly by region. Taking a data-driven approach, we use an artificial neural network to learn region-specific relationships between fire and its socio-environmental drivers across the globe. As a result, our models achieve higher predictability as compared to many state-of-the-art fire models, with global spatial correlation of 0.92, monthly temporal correlation of 0.76, interannual correlation of 0.69, and grid-cell level correlation of 0.60, between predicted and observed burned area. Given the current socio-anthropogenic conditions, Equatorial Asia, southern Africa, and Australia show a strong sensitivity of burned area to temperature whereas northern Africa shows a strong negative sensitivity. Overall, forests and shrublands show a stronger sensitivity of burned area to temperature compared to savannas, potentially weakening their status as carbon sinks under future climate-change scenarios.

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