TY - JOUR
T1 - Burned area and carbon emissions across northwestern boreal North America from 2001-2019
AU - Potter, Stefano
AU - Cooperdock, Sol
AU - Veraverbeke, Sander
AU - Walker, Xanthe
AU - Mack, Michelle C.
AU - Goetz, Scott J.
AU - Baltzer, Jennifer
AU - Bourgeau-Chavez, Laura
AU - Burrell, Arden
AU - Dieleman, Catherine
AU - French, Nancy
AU - Hantson, Stijn
AU - Hoy, Elizabeth E.
AU - Jenkins, Liza
AU - Johnstone, Jill F.
AU - Kane, Evan S.
AU - Natali, Susan M.
AU - Randerson, James T.
AU - Turetsky, Merritt R.
AU - Whitman, Ellen
AU - Wiggins, Elizabeth
AU - Rogers, Brendan M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Arctic–Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE grants NNX15AU56A and NX15AT71A to Brendan M. Rogers and Michelle C. Mack and grants NNX15AT83A and 80NSSC19M0107 to Laura Bourgeau-Chavez, Nancy H. French, and Liza Jenkins), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (grant no. 8414), the Woodwell Climate Research Center's Fund for Climate Solutions, and the Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP contract RC18-1183). Sander Veraverbeke was supported by the Dutch Research Council through Vidi grant 016.Vidi.189.070 and by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 101000987). In-kind support was provided through Bonanza Creek LTER with funding from the National Science Foundation (DEB-1636476) and the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station (RJVA-PNW-01-JV-11261952-231).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Stefano Potter et al.
PY - 2023/7/14
Y1 - 2023/7/14
N2 - Fire is the dominant disturbance agent in Alaskan and Canadian boreal ecosystems and releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Burned area and carbon emissions have been increasing with climate change, which have the potential to alter the carbon balance and shift the region from a historic sink to a source. It is therefore critically important to track the spatiotemporal changes in burned area and fire carbon emissions over time. Here we developed a new burned-area detection algorithm between 2001-2019 across Alaska and Canada at 500 m (meters) resolution that utilizes finer-scale 30 m Landsat imagery to account for land cover unsuitable for burning. This method strictly balances omission and commission errors at 500 m to derive accurate landscape- and regional-scale burned-area estimates. Using this new burned-area product, we developed statistical models to predict burn depth and carbon combustion for the same period within the NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) core and extended domain. Statistical models were constrained using a database of field observations across the domain and were related to a variety of response variables including remotely sensed indicators of fire severity, fire weather indices, local climate, soils, and topographic indicators. The burn depth and aboveground combustion models performed best, with poorer performance for belowground combustion. We estimate 2.37×106 ha (2.37 Mha) burned annually between 2001-2019 over the ABoVE domain (2.87 Mha across all of Alaska and Canada), emitting 79.3 ± 27.96 Tg (±1 standard deviation) of carbon (C) per year, with a mean combustion rate of 3.13 ± 1.17 kg C m-2. Mean combustion and burn depth displayed a general gradient of higher severity in the northwestern portion of the domain to lower severity in the south and east. We also found larger-fire years and later-season burning were generally associated with greater mean combustion. Our estimates are generally consistent with previous efforts to quantify burned area, fire carbon emissions, and their drivers in regions within boreal North America; however, we generally estimate higher burned area and carbon emissions due to our use of Landsat imagery, greater availability of field observations, and improvements in modeling. The burned area and combustion datasets described here (the ABoVE Fire Emissions Database, or ABoVE-FED) can be used for local- to continental-scale applications of boreal fire science.
AB - Fire is the dominant disturbance agent in Alaskan and Canadian boreal ecosystems and releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Burned area and carbon emissions have been increasing with climate change, which have the potential to alter the carbon balance and shift the region from a historic sink to a source. It is therefore critically important to track the spatiotemporal changes in burned area and fire carbon emissions over time. Here we developed a new burned-area detection algorithm between 2001-2019 across Alaska and Canada at 500 m (meters) resolution that utilizes finer-scale 30 m Landsat imagery to account for land cover unsuitable for burning. This method strictly balances omission and commission errors at 500 m to derive accurate landscape- and regional-scale burned-area estimates. Using this new burned-area product, we developed statistical models to predict burn depth and carbon combustion for the same period within the NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) core and extended domain. Statistical models were constrained using a database of field observations across the domain and were related to a variety of response variables including remotely sensed indicators of fire severity, fire weather indices, local climate, soils, and topographic indicators. The burn depth and aboveground combustion models performed best, with poorer performance for belowground combustion. We estimate 2.37×106 ha (2.37 Mha) burned annually between 2001-2019 over the ABoVE domain (2.87 Mha across all of Alaska and Canada), emitting 79.3 ± 27.96 Tg (±1 standard deviation) of carbon (C) per year, with a mean combustion rate of 3.13 ± 1.17 kg C m-2. Mean combustion and burn depth displayed a general gradient of higher severity in the northwestern portion of the domain to lower severity in the south and east. We also found larger-fire years and later-season burning were generally associated with greater mean combustion. Our estimates are generally consistent with previous efforts to quantify burned area, fire carbon emissions, and their drivers in regions within boreal North America; however, we generally estimate higher burned area and carbon emissions due to our use of Landsat imagery, greater availability of field observations, and improvements in modeling. The burned area and combustion datasets described here (the ABoVE Fire Emissions Database, or ABoVE-FED) can be used for local- to continental-scale applications of boreal fire science.
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U2 - 10.5194/bg-20-2785-2023
DO - 10.5194/bg-20-2785-2023
M3 - Research Article
AN - SCOPUS:85170852113
SN - 1726-4170
VL - 20
SP - 2785
EP - 2804
JO - Biogeosciences
JF - Biogeosciences
IS - 13
ER -