Carbon dioxide emissions from wild and anthropogenic fires return the carbon absorbed by plants to the atmosphere, and decrease the sequestration of carbon by land ecosystems. Future climate warming will likely increase the frequency of fire-triggering drought, so that the future terrestrial carbon uptake will depend on how fires respond to altered climate variation. In this study, we modelled ...

Other than land clearing for urban development (Wear and others 1998), no disturbance is more common in southern forests than fire. The pervasive role of fire predates human activity in the South (Komarek 1964, 1974), and humans magnified that role. Repeating patterns of fire behavior lead to recognizable fire regimes, with temporal and spatial dimensions. Understanding these fire regimes is es...

There is considerable interest in understanding the fate of the Amazon over the coming century in the face of climate change, rising atmospheric CO2 levels, ongoing land transformation, and changing fire regimes within the region. In this analysis, we explore the fate of Amazonian ecosystems under the combined impact of these four environmental forcings using three terrestrial biosphere models ...

Savanna ecosystems are semi-arid and fire-prone. Increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation in Southern Africa will probably have a series of strong impacts on the various components of fire regimes in these ecosystems that will, in turn, affect their ecology, structure, and function. This paper presents a geospatial analysis to quantify changes in fire frequency, seasonality and spat...

Climate, topography, vegetation and land use interact to influence fire regimes. Variable fire regimes may promote landscape heterogeneity, diversification in vegetation pattern and biotic diversity. The objective was to compare effects of alternative land use practices on landscape heterogeneity. Patch characteristics of fire scars were measured from 21 annual burn maps produced from 1972 to 2...

Dry forests at low elevations in temperate-zone mountains are commonly hypothesized to be at risk of exceptional rates of severe fire from climatic change and land-use effects. Their setting is fire-prone, they have been altered by land-uses, and fire severity may be increasing. However, where fires were excluded, increased fire could also be hypothesized as restorative of historical fire. Thes...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America S European landscapes are fire-prone due to the Mediterranean climate, the presence of flammable vegetation, and the rugged terrain (Pausas et al. 2008). The environmental and societal impacts of fire in the region have increased markedly during the 20th century. Pre-industrial fire regimes were generally associated with widespread ...

The ATSR World Fire Atlas is the longest global and consistent fire distribution series. The fire detection algorithms capacities and limitations will be discussed together with the method used to analyse the fire distribution trends. This trends are then presented by continent or sub continent and the first attempt to understand these evolution by Land Cover type is performed.

1 Fire is one of the main disturbances in Mediterranenan ecosystems. In the recent decades, in 2 Catalonia (NE Spain), the number of fires has decreased while burnt area has increased. This is 3 related to changes in land use, climate and fire suppression policies which influenced 4 horizontal and vertical fuel continuity. From all the factors influencing fire risk only fuel load is 5 manageabl...

Organizations managing forest land often make fire management decisions that seem overly risk-averse in relation to their stated goals for ecosystem restoration, protection of sensitive species and habitats, and protection of water and timber resources. Research in behavioral decision theory has shown that people faced with difficult decisions under uncertainty and decisions with multiple and c...