Driving forces of global wildfires over the past millennium and the forthcoming century
Open Access
- 25 October 2010
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 107 (45), 19167-19170
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1003669107
Abstract
Recent bursts in the incidence of large wildfires worldwide have raised concerns about the influence climate change and humans might have on future fire activity. Comparatively little is known, however, about the relative importance of these factors in shaping global fire history. Here we use fire and climate modeling, combined with land cover and population estimates, to gain a better understanding of the forces driving global fire trends. Our model successfully reproduces global fire activity record over the last millennium and reveals distinct regimes in global fire behavior. We find that during the preindustrial period, the global fire regime was strongly driven by precipitation (rather than temperature), shifting to an anthropogenic-driven regime with the Industrial Revolution. Our future projections indicate an impending shift to a temperature-driven global fire regime in the 21st century, creating an unprecedentedly fire-prone environment. These results suggest a possibility that in the future climate will play a considerably stronger role in driving global fire trends, outweighing direct human influence on fire (both ignition and suppression), a reversal from the situation during the last two centuries.Keywords
This publication has 23 references indexed in Scilit:
- Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate AnomalyScience, 2009
- Global Pyrogeography: the Current and Future Distribution of WildfirePLOS ONE, 2009
- Climate and human influences on global biomass burning over the past two millenniaNature Geoscience, 2008
- Early anthropogenic CH4emissions and the variation of CH4and13CH4over the last millenniumGlobal Biogeochemical Cycles, 2008
- Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: Results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System ModelProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007
- A climate-change risk analysis for world ecosystemsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006
- Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire ActivityScience, 2006
- The diversification of Paleozoic fire systems and fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen concentrationProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006
- The role of climate and vegetation change in shaping past and future fire regimes in the northwestern US and the implications for ecosystem managementForest Ecology and Management, 2003
- Simulating fire regimes in human‐dominated ecosystems: Iberian Peninsula case studyGlobal Change Biology, 2002