Control of the multimillennial wildfire size in boreal North America by spring climatic conditions

Ali, A. A., Blarquez, O., Girardin, M. P., Hely, C., Tinquaut, F., El Guellab, A., Valsecchi, V., Terrier, A., Bremond, L., Genries, A., Gauthier, S. et Bergeron, Yves (2012). Control of the multimillennial wildfire size in boreal North America by spring climatic conditions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 109 (51). pp. 20966-20970. doi:10.1073/pnas.1203467109 Repéré dans Depositum à https://depositum.uqat.ca/id/eprint/1161

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Résumé

Wildfire activity in North American boreal forests increased during the last decades of the 20th century, partly owing to ongoing human-caused climatic changes. How these changes affect regional fire regimes (annual area burned, seasonality, and number, size, and severity of fires) remains uncertain as data available to explore fire-climate-vegetation interactions have limited temporal depth. Here we present a Holocene reconstruction of fire regime, combining lacustrine charcoal analyses with past drought and fire-season length simulations to elucidate the mechanisms linking long-term fire regime and climatic changes. We decomposed fire regime into fire frequency (FF) and biomass burned (BB) and recombined these into a new index to assess fire size (FS) fluctuations. Results indicated that an earlier termination of the fire season, due to decreasing summer radiative insolation and increasing precipitation over the last 7.0 ky, induced a sharp decrease in FF and BB ca. 3.0 kyBP toward the present. In contrast, a progressive increase of FS was recorded, which is most likely related to a gradual increase in temperatures during the spring fire season. Continuing climatic warming could lead to a change in the fire regime toward larger spring wildfires in eastern boreal North America.

Type de document:	Article
Mots-clés libres:	Canada; Drought code; Global circulation model; Paleoclimate
Divisions:	Forêts
Date de dépôt:	13 mai 2020 15:56
Dernière modification:	13 mai 2020 15:56
URI:	https://depositum.uqat.ca/id/eprint/1161

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