Dataset Information

Driving forces of global wildfires over the past millennium and the forthcoming century.

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.

SUBMITTER: Pechony O

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2984177 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Driving forces of global wildfires over the past millennium and the forthcoming century.

Pechony O O Shindell D T DT

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20101025 45

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 ...[more]

PMID: 20974914

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Project description:The recurrence of mass coral bleaching and associated coral mortality in the past few decades have raised questions about the future of coral reef ecosystems. Although coral bleaching is well studied, our understanding of the spatial extent of bleaching events continues to be limited by geographical biases in data collection. To address this gap, we updated a previous observational database and spatially modelled the probability of past bleaching occurrence. First, an existing raw observational database was updated to cover the 1963-2017 period using searches of the academic and grey literature and outreach to coral reef monitoring organizations. Then, in order to provide spatially-explicit global coverage, we employed indicator kriging to spatially model the probability of bleaching occurrence each year from 1985 through 2017 at 0.05° x 0.05° lat-long resolution. The updated raw database has 37,774 observations, including 22,650 positive bleaching reports, three times that in the previous version. The spatial interpolation suggests that 71% of the world's coral reefs likely (>66% probability) experienced bleaching at least once during the 1985 and 2017 period. The mean probability of bleaching across all reefs globally was 29-45% in the most severe bleaching years of 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2016. Modelled bleaching probabilities were positively related with annual maximum Degree Heating Weeks (DHW), a measure of thermal stress, across all years (p<0.001), and in each global bleaching event (p<0.01). In addition, the annual maximum DHW of reef cells that very likely (>90% probability) experienced bleaching increased over time at three times the rate of all reef cells, suggesting a possible increase in reef thermal tolerance. The raw and spatially interpolated databases can be used by other researchers to enhance real-time predictions, calibrate models for future projections, and assess the change in coral reef response to thermal stress over time.

Dataset Information

Driving forces of global wildfires over the past millennium and the forthcoming century.

Publications

Driving forces of global wildfires over the past millennium and the forthcoming century.

Similar Datasets

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