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Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania

BACKGROUND: Anthropogenic uses of fire play a key role in regulating fire regimes in African savannas. These fires contribute the highest proportion of the globally burned area, substantial biomass burning emissions and threaten maintenance and enhancement of carbon stocks. An understanding of fire...

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Autores principales: Tarimo, Beatrice, Dick, Øystein B, Gobakken, Terje, Totland, Ørjan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer International Publishing 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4518077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26246851
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13021-015-0029-2
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author Tarimo, Beatrice
Dick, Øystein B
Gobakken, Terje
Totland, Ørjan
author_facet Tarimo, Beatrice
Dick, Øystein B
Gobakken, Terje
Totland, Ørjan
author_sort Tarimo, Beatrice
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Anthropogenic uses of fire play a key role in regulating fire regimes in African savannas. These fires contribute the highest proportion of the globally burned area, substantial biomass burning emissions and threaten maintenance and enhancement of carbon stocks. An understanding of fire regimes at local scales is required for the estimation and prediction of the contribution of these fires to the global carbon cycle and for fire management. We assessed the spatio-temporal distribution of fires in miombo woodlands of Tanzania, utilizing the MODIS active fire product and Landsat satellite images for the past ~40 years. RESULTS: Our results show that up to 50.6% of the woodland area is affected by fire each year. An early and a late dry season peak in wetter and drier miombo, respectively, characterize the annual fire season. Wetter miombo areas have higher fire activity within a shorter annual fire season and have shorter return intervals. The fire regime is characterized by small-sized fires, with a higher ratio of small than large burned areas in the frequency-size distribution (β = 2.16 ± 0.04). Large-sized fires are rare, and occur more frequently in drier than in wetter miombo. Both fire prevalence and burned extents have decreased in the past decade. At a large scale, more than half of the woodland area has less than 2 years of fire return intervals, which prevent the occurrence of large intense fires. CONCLUSION: The sizes of fires, season of burning and spatial extent of occurrence are generally consistent across time, at the scale of the current analysis. Where traditional use of fire is restricted, a reassessment of fire management strategies may be required, if sustainability of tree cover is a priority. In such cases, there is a need to combine traditional and contemporary fire management practices.
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spelling pubmed-45180772015-08-03 Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania Tarimo, Beatrice Dick, Øystein B Gobakken, Terje Totland, Ørjan Carbon Balance Manag Research BACKGROUND: Anthropogenic uses of fire play a key role in regulating fire regimes in African savannas. These fires contribute the highest proportion of the globally burned area, substantial biomass burning emissions and threaten maintenance and enhancement of carbon stocks. An understanding of fire regimes at local scales is required for the estimation and prediction of the contribution of these fires to the global carbon cycle and for fire management. We assessed the spatio-temporal distribution of fires in miombo woodlands of Tanzania, utilizing the MODIS active fire product and Landsat satellite images for the past ~40 years. RESULTS: Our results show that up to 50.6% of the woodland area is affected by fire each year. An early and a late dry season peak in wetter and drier miombo, respectively, characterize the annual fire season. Wetter miombo areas have higher fire activity within a shorter annual fire season and have shorter return intervals. The fire regime is characterized by small-sized fires, with a higher ratio of small than large burned areas in the frequency-size distribution (β = 2.16 ± 0.04). Large-sized fires are rare, and occur more frequently in drier than in wetter miombo. Both fire prevalence and burned extents have decreased in the past decade. At a large scale, more than half of the woodland area has less than 2 years of fire return intervals, which prevent the occurrence of large intense fires. CONCLUSION: The sizes of fires, season of burning and spatial extent of occurrence are generally consistent across time, at the scale of the current analysis. Where traditional use of fire is restricted, a reassessment of fire management strategies may be required, if sustainability of tree cover is a priority. In such cases, there is a need to combine traditional and contemporary fire management practices. Springer International Publishing 2015-07-30 /pmc/articles/PMC4518077/ /pubmed/26246851 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13021-015-0029-2 Text en © Tarimo et al. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Research
Tarimo, Beatrice
Dick, Øystein B
Gobakken, Terje
Totland, Ørjan
Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania
title Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania
title_full Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania
title_fullStr Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania
title_full_unstemmed Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania
title_short Spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of Tanzania
title_sort spatial distribution of temporal dynamics in anthropogenic fires in miombo savanna woodlands of tanzania
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4518077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26246851
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13021-015-0029-2
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