Defining fire environment zones in the boreal forests of northeastern China

Abstract

Fire activity in boreal forests will substantially increase with prolonged growing seasons under a warming climate. This trend poses challenges to managing fires in boreal forest landscapes. A fire environment zone map offers a basis for evaluating these fire-related problems and designing more effective fire management plans to improve the allocation of management resources across a landscape. Toward that goal, we identified three fire environment zones across boreal forest landscapes in northeastern China using analytical methods to identify spatial clustering of the environmental variables of climate, vegetation, topography, and human activity. The three fire environment zones were found to be in strong agreement with the spatial distributions of the historical fire data (occurrence, size, and frequency) for 1966-2005. This paper discusses how the resulting fire environment zone map can be used to guide forest fire management and fire regime prediction.

Keywords: Boreal forest; Environmental variables; Fire management; Fire regime; Spatial clustering.