Abstract
Vegetation fires are intrinsic ecosystem disturbances of the Earth system. Global burned area products have been delivered from several space-borne instruments, and have recently provided pixel-level information underpinning fire spread processes. Here we present FRY, a global database of fire patches with morphology-based functional traits reconstructed from pixel-based burned areas derived from the MODIS and MERIS imagery using a flood-fill algorithm. Each fire patch is characterized by the geo-location of its center, area, perimeter, the features of the ellipse fitted over its pixel’s spatial distribution, and different indices of patch complexity. We obtained a consistent spatial distribution of global fire patch functional traits between the MCD64A1 Collection 6 and the MERIS fire_cci v4.1 datasets during their overlap period (2005-2011), confirming the robustness of the applied algorithm and the consistency between both products. This database is relevant to a broad spectrum of fire-related applications such as local to global functional pyrodiversity, fire emissions quantification, and the benchmarking of fire modules embedded in dynamic global vegetation models.
Highlights
Background & SummaryVegetation fires play an important role in the Earth system
Fire processes and the associated impacts on vegetation are included in Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVM)[4], which are used to predict future fire activities and vegetation dynamics[5]
This paper presents FRY, a global database of fire patch functional traits that includes patch areas and other morphological features derived from burned areas of the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) sensors
Summary
Vegetation fires play an important role in the Earth system. They affect vegetation dynamics through biomass burning and post-fire recovery[1], significantly impacting the terrestrial carbon cycle[2]. Global fire patch data derived from pixel-level BA information have recently emerged as an important source of information for climate, vegetation and carbon cycle modeling. They are used to capture the key role of driving factors that influence burn area[11] and benchmark fire module in DGVMs4. Pyrodiversity[22], which describes the diversity of fire types in a given fire regime, is a promising approach to investigate continental and global spatio-temporal variations in fire spreading processes, recurrence or rarity of events and their drivers This new field of research in fire science resembles the emerging topic of functional biogeography[23], where the functioning of biomes is assessed from the assemblage of continuous functional traits rather than species composition and relies on databases of plant traits[24,25]. We showed that the main source of uncertainties on fire patch traits arises from the difference between the two BA products rather than the choice of the cut-off value
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