Data from: Climatic thresholds shape northern high-latitude fire regimes and imply vulnerability to future climate change ...

Boreal forests and arctic tundra cover 33% of global land area and store an estimated 50% of total soil carbon. Because wildfire is a key driver of terrestrial carbon cycling, increasing fire activity in these ecosystems would likely have global implications. To anticipate potential spatiotemporal v...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Young, Adam M., Higuera, Philip E., Duffy, Paul A., Hu, Feng Sheng
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.r217r
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.r217r
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Summary:Boreal forests and arctic tundra cover 33% of global land area and store an estimated 50% of total soil carbon. Because wildfire is a key driver of terrestrial carbon cycling, increasing fire activity in these ecosystems would likely have global implications. To anticipate potential spatiotemporal variability in fire-regime shifts, we modeled the spatially explicit 30-yr probability of fire occurrence as a function of climate and landscape features (i.e. vegetation and topography) across Alaska. Boosted regression tree (BRT) models captured the spatial distribution of fire across boreal forest and tundra ecoregions (AUC from 0.63–0.78 and Pearson correlations between predicted and observed data from 0.54–0.71), highlighting summer temperature and annual moisture availability as the most influential controls of historical fire regimes. Modeled fire–climate relationships revealed distinct thresholds to fire occurrence, with a nonlinear increase in the probability of fire above an average July temperature of ... : ScriptsFiguresThis archive contains the figures from the main text, available in 300 dpi .tif, .jpg and .fig (matlab) formats.DataClimateDataResults ...