Defining fire environment zones in the boreal forests of northeastern China.
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.
State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang 110164, China. Electronic address: wuzhiwei@iae.ac.cn.
Zhiwei
Z
Wu
School of Geographic Sciences, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China; School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri-Columbia, 203 Anheuser-Busch Natural Resources Building, Columbia, MO 65211-7270, USA. Electronic address: heh@missouri.edu.
Hong S
HS
He
State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang 110164, China. Electronic address: yangjian@iae.ac.cn.
Jian
J
Yang
State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang 110164, China. Electronic address: liangysts@gmail.com.
Yu
Y
Liang
Boreal forest; Environmental variables; Fire management; Fire regime; Spatial clustering