Spatiotemporal Analysis of Wildfires in the Forest Tundra of Western Siberia

Abstract

The climate change that has taken place in recent decades has significantly increased the threat of the occurrence and distribution of wildfires in northwestern Siberia. However, little is known about the spatial and temporal patterns of fires and their relationship with climate and vegetation in this area. As a result of processing Landsat satellite images for 1985–2017, it was determined that 10.5% of the Western Siberia forest tundra was exposed to fires. The maximum relative area of burned forests (23%) was found in larch and spruce–larch lichen woodlands. One geobotanical indicator of increased fire hazard is the dominance of synusiae of epigeic lichens in the vegetation cover. It is shown that most of the severely burned areas were distributed in the central part of the forest tundra within the largest gas fields. Our results have shown a positive significant correlation between square of areas burned and summer temperature regime (average and maximum summer temperatures) and a negative correlation between burned areas and the amount of summer precipitation. A dendrochronological analysis showed that the frequency of fires varied from 15 to 60 years (an average of about 30 years).