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A R CTIC
OCEAN
70N
60N
50N
180
30W
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60E
120W
90W
120E
30E
150W
150Е
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90E
Less than
25 years
25–50 years
50–75 years
75–100 years
100–200 years
200–400 years
More than
400 years
Fire Return Interval
Estimated time in which an entire area would be damaged by fire,
provided that the fires would spread evenly in space and time
(with their scale similar to the scale of fires in 2001-2013)
Zhuravleva I.V., Yaroshenko A.Yu. Fire return inter vals
in World’s northern forests (map). Moscow: Greenpeace Russia, 2014
Greenpeace Russia, Leningradsky prospekt, 26/1
125040, Moscow
Phone: +7 (495) 988 74 60, info@greenpeace.org
www.greenpeace.ru
What is the “Fire Return Interval”?
Northern forest landscapes to a large extent are formed by fires - both natural
(caused by lightning) and man-made. Changes in forest management may reduce
or expand the amount and scale of forest fires. Significant changes in the historically
formed fire regime can considerably reduce the biological diversity and sustainability of
forest ecosystems. These changes could be especially dangerous when they combine
with other types of human impact like cutting, mining and fragmentation of forest
landscapes.
The Fire Return Interval (hereinafter referred to as FRI) is an important integral
indicator that reflects the role of fire in forest landscapes. It shows how soon in average
fire returns to the same place, and is the inverse value to the average annual burned
area.
There is no single fire return interval that is normal or typical for all northern forests.
FRI varies widely depending on region, climate, forest types, historical and existing
land use, infrastructure and accessibility of forests and many other natural and socio-
economic reasons, and it changes over time. It may vary for different forest types
combined in one landscape, and a «normal» FRI for large areas (like million hectares)
depends on the proportion of these types.
However, extremely short fire return intervals (usually shorter than 25–50 years) for
large forest areas can serve as an alarm signal meaning that the scale and frequency
of forest fires has probably gone far beyond the range that has been typical for these
forests over centuries. Too frequent fires may lead to irreversible changes in forest
dynamics, biodiversity losses and other adverse impacts. Areas with low values of fire
return intervals (with big probability of such unfavorable changes) are marked on map
with shades of red.
Mapping methods and data sources
Modern methods of satellite based fire monitoring provide high accuracy mapping
of burned areas (especially for large scale fires, that make major contribution to the
total burned area). This map is based on the data of FIRMS1 system that records fire
hotspots (temperature anomalies fixed with MODIS sensor of Terra and Aqua satellites)
for the period of 2001-2013. The forest boundaries for the analysis and mapping have
been taken from the MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields2.
Fire return interval (FRI) is defined by the following formula3:
Every map pixel reflects the fire return interval calculated for a circle with the area of
1 million hectares with the center in this pixel. Here Т is equal to thirteen years, А – to
the area of forests (number of forest pixels) inside the circle and В – to the area of these
forests that were burned (number of pixels where at least one fire hotspot was fixed
during the Т time period).
The map has a number of limitations mainly in considerably fragmented forest
landscapes of the forest-steppe zone that are connected with technical peculiarities
of the used data. The more detailed description of the methods could be found here:
http://forestforum.ru/fri.
1 NASA MCD14ML MODIS Active Fire Detections. Data set. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/active-fire-data#tab-content-6
2 DiMiceli, C.M., M.L. Carroll, R.A. Sohlberg, C. Huang, M.C. Hansen, and J.R.G. Townshend (2011), Annual Global Automated
MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields (MOD44B) at 250 m Spatial Resolution for Data Years Beginning Day 65, 2000–2010,
Collection 5 Percent Tree Cover, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. http://glcf.umd.edu/data /vcf
3 Chao Li. Estimation of fire frequency and fire cycle: a computational perspective. Ecological Modelling 154 (2002) 103–120.
Fire return intervals
in World’s northern
forests
B
A
means the fire return interval (in years);
T — period with comparable data (in years);
А
В