Research article - Peer-reviewed, 2021
Trends and patterns in annually burned forest areas and fire weather across the European boreal zone in the 20th and early 21st centuries
Drobyshev, Igor; Ryzhkova, Nina; Eden, Jonathan; Kitenberga, Mara; Pinto, Guilherme; Lindberg, Henrik; Krikken, Folmer; Yermokhin, Maxim; Bergeron, Yves; Kryshen, AlexanderAbstract
Fire remains one of the main natural disturbance factors in the European boreal zone and understanding climatic forcing on fire activity is important for projecting effects of climate change on ecosystem services in this region. We analyzed records of annually burned areas in 16 administrative regions of the European boreal zone (countries or administrative units within countries) and fire weather variability to test for their spatio-temporal patterns over the 1901-2017 period.Over the 1992-2017 period, the region exhibited large variability in forest fire activity with the fire cycles varying from similar to 1600 (St. Petersburg region) to similar to 37000 years (Finland). The clustering of administrative units in respect to their burned area, suggested the presence of sub-regions with synchronous annual variability in burned areas. Large fire years (LFYs) in each of the clusters were associated with the development of the high pressure cell over or in immediate proximity of the regions in question in July, indicating climatic forcing of LFYs. Contingency analysis indicated that there was no long-term trend in the synchrony of LFYs observed simultaneously in several administrative units. We documented a trend towards higher values of Monthly Drought Code (MDC) for the months of April and May in the western (April) and northern (April and May) sections. The significant positive correlation between biome-wide fire activity index and June SNAO (Summer North Atlantic Oscillation) (r = 0.53) pointed to the importance of large-scale atmospheric circulation, in particular the summer European blocking pattern, in controlling forest fires across EBZ. The forest fire activity of the European boreal zone remains strongly connected to the annual climate variability. Higher frequency of strongly positive SNAO states in the future will likely synchronize years with a large area burned across the European boreal zone.Keywords
Forest fires; Disturbance regimes; Climate-fire interactions; Trends in drought conditions; Climate-related risksPublished in
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology2021, volume: 306, article number: 108467
Publisher: ELSEVIER
Authors' information
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre
Russian Academy of Sciences
Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT)
Ryzhkova, Nina
Russian Academy of Sciences
Eden, Jonathan
Coventry University
Kitenberga, Mara
Latvian State Forest Research Institute Silava
Pinto, Guilherme (Stecher Justiniano Pinto, Guilherme Alexandre)
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)
Lindberg, Henrik
Hame University of Applied Sciences
Krikken, Folmer
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
Yermokhin, Maxim
National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (NASB)
Bergeron, Yves
Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT)
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG15 Life on land
SDG13 Climate action
UKÄ Subject classification
Forest Science
Publication Identifiers
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2021.108467
URI (permanent link to this page)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/112676