Abstract
Increased fire activity across the Amazon, Australia, and even the Arctic regions has received wide recognition in the global media in recent years. Large-scale, long-term analyses are required to postulate if these incidents are merely peaks within the natural oscillation, or rather the consequence of a linearly rising trend. While extensive datasets are available to facilitate the investigation of the extent and frequency of wildfires, no means has been available to also study the severity of the burnings on a comparable scale. This is now possible through a dataset recently published by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). This study exploits the possibilities of this new dataset by exemplarily analyzing fire severity trends on the Australian East coast for the past 20 years. The analyzed data is based on 3503 tiles of the ESA Sentinel-3 OLCI instrument, extended by 9612 granules of the NASA MODIS MOD09/MYD09 product. Rising trends in fire severity could be found for the states of New South Wales and Victoria, which could be attributed mainly to developments in the temperate climate zone featuring hot summers without a dry season (Cfa). Within this climate zone, the ecological units featuring needleleaf and evergreen forest are found to be mainly responsible for the increasing trend development. The results show a general, statistically significant shift of fire activity towards the affection of more woody, ecologically valuable vegetation.
Highlights
Wildfires have always played a significant role in the evolution of various ecosystems and are the predominant natural disturbance factor in many parts of the world
The authors stated that the consequences for ecosystem dynamics might be critical, as temperate forests usually adapted to fire could be damaged irreversibly through higher severity burnings
The pronounced, inter-annual variability in fire activity together with the spatial dynamics of wildfires often prohibits the derivation of statistically significant trends
Summary
Wildfires have always played a significant role in the evolution of various ecosystems and are the predominant natural disturbance factor in many parts of the world. They significantly influence ecological patterns and processes on a global scale. This includes vegetation distribution and structure, as well as the carbon cycle [1]. Research has shown that forest loss has increased substantially over the past two decades in many parts of the world, and that the underlying dynamics are strongly linked to fire activity [4]. Several studies have discovered changes in the frequency and size of wildfires and in the length of the fire season, for example, regarding the Canadian boreal forest [5] and the Western United States [6]
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