Impact of human population density on fire frequency at the global scale
Författare
Summary, in English
Human impact on wildfires, a major earth system component, remains poorly understood. While local studies have found more fires close to settlements and roads, assimilated charcoal records and analyses of regional fire patterns from remote-sensing observations point to a decline in fire frequency with increasing human population. Here, we present a global analysis using three multi-year satellite-based burned-area products combined with a parameter estimation and uncertainty analysis with a non-linear model. We show that at the global scale, the impact of increasing population density is mainly to reduce fire frequency. Only for areas with up to 0.1 people per km(2), we find that fire frequency increases by 10 to 20% relative to its value at no population. The results are robust against choice of burned-area data set, and indicate that at only very few places on earth, fire frequency is limited by human ignitions. Applying the results to historical population estimates results in a moderate but accelerating decline of global burned area by around 14% since 1800, with most of the decline since 1950.
Avdelning/ar
Publiceringsår
2014
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
1085-1102
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Biogeosciences
Volym
11
Issue
4
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
Copernicus GmbH
Ämne
- Physical Geography
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 1726-4189