Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Vegetation fires display marked seasonality, which is controlled by a combination of climatic factors and land use management practices, has not been thoroughly characterized at the global scale. We used active fire counts from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS), aggregated at 0.5° spatial resolution, over the period 2001-2009, to derive maps of fire season start, peak, end, and duration. This analysis relied on TIMESAT, a software package originally developed to extract seasonal parameters from time series of satellite imagery. Active fire count time series were fitted with a Savitsky-Golay filter, and seasonality parameters were extracted from the fitted functions. We also developed the first ever global analysis of fire season modality, classifying global fire activity into uni- and bimodal fire seasons. This classification relied on the use of circular statistics techniques, namely fitting a single von Mises distribution, or a mixture of two distributions. Model fit was assess with the Nash-Sutcliff model efficiency index. The largest concentration of cells with bimodal fire season was found in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia. Areas with complex fire seasonality, and which were left unclassified pending methodological refinement, are located in the southeastern USA, southern South America, southeastern China and southeastern Australia.
Authors: Pereira, José Miguel Cardoso, Benali, Akli Ait, Oom, Duarte, Mota, Bernardo, Page, Yannick Le
Institutions: Centro de Estudos Florestais, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa
Language: English
Topic: Fire effects on ecosystems
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDGs: Climate action, Life on land
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7052836491