Data from: Pyrogeography across the western Palearctic: A diversity of fire regimes

• Main Author: Pausas, J. G.
• Other Authors: European Commission, Pausas, J. G. [e-mail]
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2022
• Subjects: Earth and related environmental sciences; Europe; Fire and climate; Fire regime; Fire size; Near East; North Africa; Pyrogeography; Pyrome; Tundra
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/276369; https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k98sf7m8c; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000780

[Methods] We first defined eight large ecoregions based on their environment and vegetation: Mediterranean, Arid, Atlantic, Mountains, Boreal, Steppes, Continental, and Tundra. These ecoregions were defined by aggregating 81 WWF ecoregions with the help of the bioregions (https://www.oneearth.org/bioregions-2020/). We provide the shape files with these ecoregions. Then we intersected each ecoregion with individual-fire data obtained from remote sensing hotspots to estimate fire regime parameters for each environment. Specifically, we computed the following fire statistics for each ecoregion and year (2001-2019): area burnt; mean fire size; fire intensity; fire season; fire patchiness (CV of the fire intensity in each fire); fire recurrence and pyrodiversity. This data was estimated based on individual-fire data provided in GlobFire (Artés et al. 2019) except fire intensity that was estimated using MODIS hotspots (Collection 6 Active Fire Products from Terra and Aqua satellites, dataset MCD14ML; downloaded from the University of Maryland, USA; period 2001-2021). Fire recurrence for each ecoregion was estimated as the number of times each patch was burnt. The pyrodiversity of each ecoregion (i.e., fire-caused landscape heterogeneity) was estimated as the Shannon diversity of fire patches, that is, considering the relative abundance (sizes) of fire-produced patches in each ecoregion. The data provided is the average by ecoregion and year, except for patchiness we provide the area of each patch in each ecoregion, and the number of times the patch burned. More details are provided in the original article. [Usage Notes] The ecoregion map is in "shape" format and can be opened with most GIS softwares (e.g., QGIS). The data is provided as comma-delimited files (csv; ASCII) and can be opened with most softwares for numerical analysis (e.g. in R using the function read.csv) or with a spreadsheet (e.g., LibreOffice Spreadsheet). We characterised fire regimes and estimated fire regime parameters (area burnt, size, ...