Abstract
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.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 2785-2804 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Biogeosciences |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 13 |
Early online date | 14 Jul 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Bibliographical note
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.
Funding
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).
Funders | Funder number |
---|---|
Bonanza Creek LTER | |
Woodwell Climate Research Center | |
National Science Foundation | DEB-1636476 |
National Science Foundation | |
U.S. Department of Defense | |
National Aeronautics and Space Administration | NX15AT71A, NNX15AT83A, 80NSSC19M0107, NNX15AU56A |
National Aeronautics and Space Administration | |
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation | 8414 |
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation | |
U.S. Forest Service | |
Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program | RC18-1183 |
Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program | |
Pacific Northwest Research Station | RJVA-PNW-01-JV-11261952-231 |
Pacific Northwest Research Station | |
European Research Council | |
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | 016 |
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | |
Horizon 2020 | 101000987 |
Horizon 2020 |