Fire Activity and Severity in the Western US Vary along Proxy Gradients Representing Fuel Amount and Fuel Moisture

Numerous theoretical and empirical studies have shown that wildfire activity (e.g., area burned) at regional to global scales may be limited at the extremes of environmental gradients such as productivity or moisture. Fire activity, however, represents only one component of the fire regime, and no s...

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Published in:PloS one Vol. 9; no. 6; p. e99699
Main Authors: Parks, Sean A., Parisien, Marc-André, Miller, Carol, Dobrowski, Solomon Z.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States Public Library of Science 18.06.2014
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects:
Artemisia tridentata
Biogeography
Biology and Life Sciences
Biomass
Climate change
Climate models
Desert Climate
Drought
Earth Sciences
Ecology
Ecosystems
Engineering and Technology
Environmental gradient
Evapotranspiration
Fires
Forests
Fossil Fuels
Fuels
Future climates
Geographical distribution
Humidity
Mathematical models
Models, Theoretical
Moisture
Plant Transpiration
Precipitation
Spatial data
Spatial distribution
Statistical analysis
Statistical models
Studies
United States
Water
Water balance
Water deficit
Water shortages
Wilderness areas
Wildfires
United States
Western states
ISSN:1932-6203, 1932-6203
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Numerous theoretical and empirical studies have shown that wildfire activity (e.g., area burned) at regional to global scales may be limited at the extremes of environmental gradients such as productivity or moisture. Fire activity, however, represents only one component of the fire regime, and no studies to date have characterized fire severity along such gradients. Given the importance of fire severity in dictating ecological response to fire, this is a considerable knowledge gap. For the western US, we quantify relationships between climate and the fire regime by empirically describing both fire activity and severity along two climatic water balance gradients, actual evapotranspiration (AET) and water deficit (WD), that can be considered proxies for fuel amount and fuel moisture, respectively. We also concurrently summarize fire activity and severity among ecoregions, providing an empirically based description of the geographic distribution of fire regimes. Our results show that fire activity in the western US increases with fuel amount (represented by AET) but has a unimodal (i.e., humped) relationship with fuel moisture (represented by WD); fire severity increases with fuel amount and fuel moisture. The explicit links between fire regime components and physical environmental gradients suggest that multivariable statistical models can be generated to produce an empirically based fire regime map for the western US. Such models will potentially enable researchers to anticipate climate-mediated changes in fire recurrence and its impacts based on gridded spatial data representing future climate scenarios.
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Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Conceived and designed the experiments: SP MAP CM SD. Performed the experiments: SP. Analyzed the data: SP. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SD. Wrote the paper: SP MAP CM SD.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0099699