Historical Fire Records in the North American Boreal Forest

Murphy, Peter J.; Mudd, James P.; Stocks, B. J.; Kasischke, Eric S.; Barry, D. J.; Alexander, Martin E.; French, Nancy H. F.

doi:10.1007/978-0-387-21629-4_15

Cited by 48 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Changes in land cover that are occurring include lengthening of the growing season in Alaska (Keyser et al, 2000), and a doubling of annual area burned in the boreal forest of North America during the last twenty years in comparison with earlier decades (Murphy et al, 2000). Analyses of northern hemisphere NDVI over the last two decades are consistent with expanding growing seasons, greater growth of trees, and expansion of shrub tundra (Myneni et al, 1997Zhou et al, 2001;Lucht et al, 2002;Jia et al, 2003).…”

Section: Growing Season and Phenologymentioning

confidence: 87%

Evidence and Implications of Recent Climate Change in Northern Alaska and Other Arctic Regions

et al. 2005

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The Arctic climate is changing. Permafrost is warming, hydrological processes are changing and biological and social systems are also evolving in response to these changing conditions. Knowing how the structure and function of arctic terrestrial ecosystems are responding to recent and persistent climate change is paramount to understanding the future state of the Earth system and how humans will need to adapt. Our holistic review presents a broad array of evidence that illustrates convincingly; the Arctic is undergoing a system-wide response to an altered climatic state. New extreme and seasonal surface climatic conditions are being experienced, a range of biophysical states and processes influenced by the threshold and phase change of freezing point are being altered, hydrological and biogeochemical cycles are shifting, and more regularly human sub-systems are being affected. Importantly, the patterns, magnitude and mechanisms of change have sometimes been unpredictable or difficult to isolate due to compounding factors. In almost every discipline represented, we show Climatic Change (2005) 72: 251-298 how the biocomplexity of the Arctic system has highlighted and challenged a paucity of integrated scientific knowledge, the lack of sustained observational and experimental time series, and the technical and logistic constraints of researching the Arctic environment. This study supports ongoing efforts to strengthen the interdisciplinarity of arctic system science and improve the coupling of large scale experimental manipulation with sustained time series observations by incorporating and integrating novel technologies, remote sensing and modeling.

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Section: Growing Season and Phenologymentioning

confidence: 87%

Evidence and Implications of Recent Climate Change in Northern Alaska and Other Arctic Regions

et al. 2005

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“…The inset shows the distribution of all biomass cells, including the 4% of sample with biomass >250 t/ha. areas of Canada and in Russian boreal forests, where the fire history record is incomplete (Murphy et al, 2000;Shvidenko & Nilsson, 2000).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating fire-related parameters in boreal forest using SPOT VEGETATION

Fraser¹,

Li²

2002

Remote Sensing of Environment

105

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The majority of burning in the boreal forest zone consists of stand replacement fires larger than 10 km 2 occurring in remote, sparsely populated regions. Satellite remote sensing using coarse resolution ( c 1 km) sensors is thus well suited in documenting the spatial and temporal distribution of fires in this zone. The purpose of this study was to investigate the utility of the SPOT VEGETATION (VGT) sensor for estimating three key parameters related to boreal forest fire: burned area, postfire regeneration age, and aboveground biomass. Based on a sample of fires across Canada, the best overall discrimination of burned forest was provided by a normalized short-wave-based vegetation index (SWVI) that combines near-infrared (NIR) and short-wave infrared (SWIR) channels from VGT. Multitemporal differencing of this index from anniversary date VGT composites was combined synergistically with active fire locations from NOAA/AVHRR to map Canadian forest that burned during 1998 and 1999. National burned area estimates for both years were within 15% of those compiled by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. The normalized index also was correlated (R=.68) with the age of regenerating forests in Saskatchewan and Manitoba that burned between 1949 and 1998. An artificial neural network (ANN) model developed using temporal metrics computed from VGT could predict the age of these forests with an RMS error of 7 years (R=.83). By contrast, forest biomass based on Canada's Forest Inventory (CanFI) was estimated with relatively poor accuracy (RMS = 32 tons/ha) from VGT reflectance and terrestrial ecozone using a network model. We conclude that the VGT instrument is effective for mapping large boreal burns at the end of a fire season and approximating the age of regenerating burns less than about 30 years old. This information can be useful to supplement conventional groundbased data sets in remote areas where coverage may be incomplete. D

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“…Both fire occurrence and average annual area burned by Canadian forest fires have increased over the past three decades. The records indicate 6000 fires per year in the period 1930-1960 to almost 10 000 fires per year during the 1980s and 1990 (Murphy et al 2000), where the change in fire occurrence is attributed to a growing population, expanded forest use, and an increased detection capability (Stock and Simard 1993).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A physics-based approach to modelling grassland fires

Mell

Jenkins

Gould

et al. 2007

Int. J. Wildland Fire

468

344

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Physics-based coupled fire-atmosphere models are based on approximations to the governing equations of fluid dynamics, combustion, and the thermal degradation of solid fuel. They require significantly more computational resources than the most commonly used fire spread models, which are semi-empirical or empirical. However, there are a number of fire behaviour problems, of increasing relevance, that are outside the scope of empirical and semi-empirical models. Examples are wildland-urban interface fires, assessing how well fuel treatments work to reduce the intensity of wildland fires, and investigating the mechanisms and conditions underlying blow-up fires and fire spread through heterogeneous fuels. These problems are not amenable to repeatable full-scale field studies. Suitably validated coupled atmosphere-fire models are one way to address these problems. This paper describes the development of a three-dimensional, fully transient, physics-based computer simulation approach for modelling fire spread through surface fuels. Grassland fires were simulated and compared to findings from Australian experiments. Predictions of the head fire spread rate for a range of ambient wind speeds and ignition line-fire lengths compared favourably to experiments. In addition, two specific experimental cases were simulated in order to evaluate how well the model predicts the development of the entire fire perimeter.

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Historical Fire Records in the North American Boreal Forest

Cited by 48 publications

References 6 publications

Evidence and Implications of Recent Climate Change in Northern Alaska and Other Arctic Regions

Evidence and Implications of Recent Climate Change in Northern Alaska and Other Arctic Regions

Estimating fire-related parameters in boreal forest using SPOT VEGETATION

A physics-based approach to modelling grassland fires

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