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Disentangling the factors of spatio-temporal patterns of wildfire activity in south-eastern France

Authors :
Jorge Castel-Clavera
François Pimont
Thomas Opitz
Julien Ruffault
Miguel Rivière
Jean-Luc Dupuy
Source :
International Journal of Wildland Fire. 32:15-28
Publication Year :
2022
Publisher :
CSIRO Publishing, 2022.

Abstract

Background Identifying if and how climatic and non-climatic factors drive local changes in fire regimes is, as in many other human-dominated landscapes, challenging in south-eastern France where both heterogeneous spatial patterns and complex fire trends are observed. Aim We sought to identify the factors driving the spatial-temporal patterns of fire activity in southeastern France. Methods We incorporated several non-climatic variables into the probabilistic Firelihood model of fire activity and implemented an enhanced spatio-temporal component to quantitatively assess remaining unexplained variations in fire activity. Key results Several non-climatic drivers (i.e. orography, land cover and human activities) contributed as much as fire-weather to the distribution of fire occurrence (>1 ha) but less to larger fires (>10, 100 and 1000 ha). Over the past decades, increased fire-weather induced a strong increase in wildfire probabilities, which was actually observed on the western part of the region but not so in the east and Corsican Island, most likely due to reinforced suppression policies. Conclusions While spatial patterns in fire activity are driven by land-use and land-cover factors, temporal patterns were mostly driven by changes in fire-weather and unexplained effects potentially related to suppression policies but with large differences between regions.

Subjects

Subjects :
Ecology
Forestry

Details

ISSN :
14485516 and 10498001
Volume :
32
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
International Journal of Wildland Fire
Accession number :
edsair.doi...........f97221e250861ca7519930509f6a5df2
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1071/wf22086