Disentangling the factors of spatio-temporal patterns of wildfire activity in south-eastern France

Abstract

Background Identifying if and how climatic and non-climatic factors drive local changes in fire regimes is, as in many other human-dominated landscapes, challenging in south-eastern France where both heterogeneous spatial patterns and complex fire trends are observed. Aim We sought to identify the factors driving the spatial-temporal patterns of fire activity in southeastern France. Methods We incorporated several non-climatic variables into the probabilistic Firelihood model of fire activity and implemented an enhanced spatio-temporal component to quantitatively assess remaining unexplained variations in fire activity. Key results Several non-climatic drivers (i.e. orography, land cover and human activities) contributed as much as fire-weather to the distribution of fire occurrence (>1 ha) but less to larger fires (>10, 100 and 1000 ha). Over the past decades, increased fire-weather induced a strong increase in wildfire probabilities, which was actually observed on the western part of the region but not so in the east and Corsican Island, most likely due to reinforced suppression policies. Conclusions While spatial patterns in fire activity are driven by land-use and land-cover factors, temporal patterns were mostly driven by changes in fire-weather and unexplained effects potentially related to suppression policies but with large differences between regions.