Atmospheric Cascades Shape Wildfire Activity and Fire Management Decision Spaces Across Scales − A Conceptual Framework for Fire Prediction

Abstract

This study uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate variability in fire weather, fire activity and fire management decision spaces in western Canada from three separate perspectives. We used time series analysis to identify periodic and quasi-periodic components of fire weather measures at second, hourly, daily, yearly, and multi-decadal resolution in 3 ecozones. Examples of relationships between scales of fire weather and fire activity were taken from the literature. Through interviews with and observation of Canadian wildland fire management agencies we identified 20 typical decision problems which we mapped to 16 spatio-temporally cohesive decision spaces extending from incident to national levels and immediate to multi-decadal time spans. To connect these domains, we propose that space time cascades of atmospheric kinetic energy are reflected in an inverse cascade of wildfire activity, and shape the spatio-temporal dimensions of decision spaces and the pace of fire management decisions.

Understanding fire regimes in Europe

“…Wildland fire risk management calls for efficient approaches to better understand fire activity at different spatio-temporal scales (Johnston et al 2020;Taylor 2020). Grouping regions with similar fire regime components may help develop efficient strategies to manage fires across broad scales and to aggregate data over regions with consistent fire regimes (Boulanger et al 2012;Curt et al 2014).…”

“…On shorter timescales, pyroregions may change, switching from one category to another. Identifying regions featuring persistent fire regimes across Europe may support wildland fire suppression capacity, surveillance, and resources allocation at a broad scale (Taylor 2020). This may also enable the assessment of fire deficits over time across the pyroregions, ultimately helping devising fuel treatment campaigns.…”

“…By examining the sensitivity of our classification to the interannual variability of fire regime components, we also quantify the uncertainty of our classification while understanding how pyroregions may change in the future (Cochrane and Bowman 2021). This is paramount from a fire risk management perspective because decisions are taken at many different scales (Parisien et al 2014;Taylor 2020).…”

Editorial: Climate, Land Use, and Fire: Can Models Inform Management?

“…A second grouping of studies highlighted the various ways in which modeling can more broadly inform management decisions, including a review of various modeling efforts to help managers assess and address ecosystem stability (Loehman et al, 2020), the identification of non-stationarity in extreme fire seasons that emphasizes the need for modernizing fire risk approaches (Barbero et al, 2020), and the importance of ecosystem threshold behavior in savanna ecosystems to changing fire frequency that will require agile models forecasting such drastic change in conditions (Gomes et al, 2020). Two final papers highlight next steps for the fire modeling community: the well known goal of improving earth system models that are used to simulate future climate and could be used to assess the climate mitigation potential of fire management to inform international policy (D'Onofrio et al, 2020); the potential of linking fire regime characteristics with fire management decisions in modeling efforts to create more useful tools to address the challenges ahead (Taylor 2020).…”

“…The representation of fire in such models is important to understand the effects of changing fire regimes but also the potential influence of human fire management on future climate and ecosystem properties. Taylor (2020) investigated the relationship between wildfire activity and management decisions across spatio-temporal scales in Canada. Time series analysis methods were applied to investigate the temporal scales of fire weather and activity while fire management decision problems were identified through interviews with fire management agencies.…”