Separating agricultural and non-agricultural fire seasonality at regional scales

[摘要] The timing and length of burning seasons in different parts of the worlddepend on climate, land-cover characteristics, and human activities. In thisstudy, global burned area estimates are used in conjunction with globalgridded distributions of agricultural land-cover types (defined as the sumof cropland and pasture area) to separate the seasonality of agriculturalburning practices from that of non-agricultural fire. The results presentedin this study show that agricultural and non-agricultural land experiencebroadly different fire seasonality patterns that are not always linked toclimate conditions. We highlight these differences on a regional basis,examining variations in both agricultural land cover and associated culturalpractices to help explain our results. While we discuss two land-covercategories, the methods can be generalized to derive seasonality for anynumber of land uses or cover types. This will be useful as global firemodels evolve to be fully interactive with land-use and land-cover change inthe next generation of Earth system models.

[学科分类] 地球化学与岩石