High-severity wildfires in temperate Australian forests have increased in extent and aggregation in recent decades
Identifiers
Permanent link (URI): http://hdl.handle.net/10017/59703DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242484
ISSN: 1932-6203
Date
2020-11-01Academic Departments
Universidad de Alcalá. Departamento de Geología, Geografía y Medio Ambiente
Teaching unit
Unidad Docente Geografía
Funders
Vietnam International Education Cooperation Department
Melbourne Research Scholarship program
Integrated Forest Ecosystem Research program, supported by the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning
Bibliographic citation
PLOS ONE, 2020, v. 15, n. 11
Document type
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Version
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Rights
© plos.org
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Access rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Abstract
Wildfires have increased in size and frequency in recent decades in many biomes, but have they also become more severe? This question remains under-examined despite fire severity being a critical aspect of fire regimes that indicates fire impacts on ecosystem attributes and associated post-fire recovery. We conducted a retrospective analysis of wildfires larger than 1000 ha in south-eastern Australia to examine the extent and spatial pattern of high-severity burned areas between 1987 and 2017. High-severity maps were generated from Landsat remote sensing imagery. Total and proportional high-severity burned area increased through time. The number of high-severity patches per year remained unchanged but variability in patch size increased, and patches became more aggregated and more irregular in shape. Our results confirm that wildfires in southern Australia have become more severe. This shift in fire regime may have critical consequences for ecosystem dynamics, as fire-adapted temperate forests are more likely to be burned at high severities relative to historical ranges, a trend that seems set to continue under projections of a hotter, drier climate in south-eastern Australia.
Files in this item
| Files | Size | Format |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| high_tran_PLOSONE_2020.pdf | 2.255Mb |
|
| Files | Size | Format |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| high_tran_PLOSONE_2020.pdf | 2.255Mb |
|















