Researchers used thermal-infrared sensor data from the European Space Agency satellites to study the distribution and behavior of wildfires (pyrogeography) from 1996 to 2006 on a global scale. This work is the first to map global fire trends and to model the variables that contribute to the risk for fires tied to climate change. Preliminary results show areas where fire invation will occur due to climate change, including the western United States and the Tibetan plateau.
“Fire patterns are going to change, and we need to start thinking about what that means for ecosystems, and what our response should be,” said the paper’s lead author, Meg Krawchuk, a UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and by Canada’s National Sciences & Engineering Research Council. “Fire will be a major driver of change. A large decrease in fire activity is not necessarily a good thing for an ecosystem that has adapted to periodic wildfires. Some species of trees rely upon fires occurring at specific times to regenerate, for example, so changes in a fire regime have the potential to dramatically alter the landscape over time.”
Read more about this research here.
