Anthropogenic and Lightning Fire Incidence and Burned Area in Europe

Abstract

Fires can have an anthropogenic or natural origin. The most frequent natural fire cause is lightning. Since anthropogenic and lightning fires have different climatic and socio-economic drivers, it is important to distinguish between these different fire causes. We developed random forest models that predict the fraction of anthropogenic and lightning fire incidences, and their burned area, at the level of the Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques level 3 (NUTS3) for Europe. The models were calibrated using the centered log-ratio of fire incidence and burned area reference data from the European Forest Fire Information System. After a correlation analysis, the population density, fractional human land impact, elevation and burned area coefficient of variation—a measure of interannual variability in burned area—were selected as predictor variables in the models. After parameter tuning and running the models with several train-validate compositions, we found that the vast majority of fires and burned area in Europe has an anthropogenic cause, while lightning plays a significant role in the remote northern regions of Scandinavia. Combining our results with burned area data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, we estimated that 96.5 ± 0.9% of the burned area in Europe has an anthropogenic cause. Our spatially explicit fire cause attribution model demonstrates the spatial variability between anthropogenic and lightning fires and their burned area over Europe and could be used to improve predictive fire models by accounting for fire cause.

Reviewing the links and feedbacks between climate change and air pollution in Europe

“…With the Industrial Revolution, this changed to an anthropogenicdriven regime , and there are now indications that we are moving towards a temperaturedriven fire regime during this century. However, currently the main cause of wildfires is anthropogenic activities related to agriculture and forest management practices, as well as from recreational habits Dijkstra et al, 2022). In Southern Europe, more than 95% of the fires with a known cause have an anthropogenic origin (Ganteaume et al, 2013;Parente et al, 2018), while in central Europe, more than 99% of fires are caused by humans (Ganteaume et al, 2013).…”

Joint Analysis of Lightning-Induced Forest Fire and Surface Influence Factors in the Great Xing’an Range

“…Therefore, we cannot identify the vegetation conditions' contribution to the fire-affected areas. One reason why the lightning parameters show a low influence on lightning-induced forest fires is that we used the fire-affected area as our independent variable; lightning is the driving factor influencing fire frequency (or fire occurrence) [92,97], but once a fire starts, the climatic conditions together with topological conditions are the main drivers to the fire-affected areas [98][99][100]. Another reason is that while we used cloud-top properties and simulated lightning-flash density, we did not differentiate cloud-to-cloud lightning flash from cloud-to-ground lightning flash, which might explain why the lightning parameters show a low correlation with the fire-affected areas.…”

Drivers and implications of the extreme 2022 wildfire season in Southwest Europe

“…Lightning is associated with more extreme fires as they occur under higher atmospheric instability (Fernandes et al, 2021). Over the Iberian Peninsula, lightning fires are known to be linked to dry thunderstorm episodes, particularly frequent in certain enclaves in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula (Dijkstra et al, 2022). Summer thunderstorms are usually linked to thermal lows eventually developing after sustained anticyclonic conditions driving abnormally high temperatures (Fernandes et al, 2016;Rodrigues et al, 2019).…”