The increased frequency and spread of tropical peat fires over the last two decades have attracted global attention because they cause significant environmental and health impacts at local to global scales. To understand the relative importance of key factors controlling tropical peatland burning events, we developed PeatFire, an agent-based model simulating the interaction between human-induced ignitions, fire and peat characteristics. The model describes (1) above- and belowground fires, which spread independently but interact with each other; (2) above- and belowground biomass; and (3) the watertable determining peat dryness and susceptibility to fire. We applied PeatFire to a region in South Sumatra that has experienced profound natural rainforest loss due to peat fires. Sensitivity analysis of the model suggests that fire sizes depend mostly on watertable depth, peat-dry-index and number of dry days before ignition. Using pattern-oriented modelling, these factors were parameterised so that the model output matches spatiotemporal fire patterns observed in the study region in 2015. Our results emphasise the risk of a sudden shift from moderate fire occurrence to complete burning and highlight the importance of local context to peatland regulation, which should consider both biophysical and socioeconomic factors and strategies for peatland fire management.
Fire is considered a major threat to biodiversity in many habitats and the occurrence of fire has frequently been used to investigate the effectiveness of protected areas. Yet, despite the known importance of tropical peatlands for biodiversity conservation and serious threat that anthropogenically induced fires pose to this ecosystem, the influence of protected area designation on fire occurrence in tropical peatland has been poorly assessed thus far. Our study addresses this knowledge gap through providing a novel assessment of fire patterns from a tropical peatland protected area and surrounding landscape. We investigated the importance of both climatic factors (top-down mechanism) and human interventions (bottom-up mechanism) on fire occurrence through analyzing 20-years (2001–2020) of LANDSAT and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) images of the Padang Sugihan Wildlife Reserve and a 10-km buffer area surrounding this in Sumatra, Indonesia. Fire density was assessed in relation to road and canal construction. Monthly and annual precipitation was compared between wet and dry years. The reserve was effective in limiting fire compared to surrounding landscapes only in wet years. We revealed that peat fire occurrence in the protected area and buffer zone was not due to climatic factors alone, with distance from canals and roads also contributing toward fire occurrence. Our results suggest that it is essential to address tropical peatland fire processes at a landscape level, particularly at the surroundings of protected areas, in order to increase the effectiveness of fire protection, improve fire risk classification maps, and conserve threatened tropical peatland wildlife such as the Sumatran elephant.
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