Wild, Tamed, and Domesticated: three fire macroregimes for global pyrogeography in the Anthropocene

Fire regime classification and mapping may contribute towards improved understanding of relationships between those fire drivers. We used 15 years of daily active fire data from the MODIS fire product to create global maps of six fire descriptors (incidence, size inequality, season length, interannual variability, intensity, and fire season modality). Using MCA and hierarchical agglomerative clustering, we identified three fire macroregimes: Wild, Tamed, and Domesticated, each of which splitting into prototypical and transitional regimes. Interpretation of the six fire regimes in terms of their main drivers relied on the global maps of anthromes and Köppen climate types. The analysis yielded a two-dimensional space. The Wild fire macroregime occurs mostly in cold wildlands, where burning is sporadic and fire seasons are short. Tamed fires predominate in seasonally dry tropical rangelands and croplands with high fire incidence. Domesticated fires are characteristic of humid, warm temperate and tropical croplands and villages with low fire incidence. The Tamed and Domesticated fire macroregimes, representing managed burning, account for 86% of all active fires in our dataset and for 70% of the global burnable area. Fourteen percent of active fires were found in the cold wildlands, and in the rangelands and forests of steppe and desert climates of the Wild macroregime. These results highlight the extent of human control over global pyrogeography in the Anthropocene.

PEREIRA-MIGUEL Jose;  JACOME FELIX OOM Duarte;  SILVA Pedro;  BENALI Akli; 

2022-09-05

WILEY

JRC129829

1051-0761 (online),   

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.2588,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC129829,   

10.1002/eap.2588 (online),