Abstract
Globally, changing fire regimes due to climate is one of the greatest threats to ecosystems and society. In this paper, we present projections of future fire probability for the southcentral USA using downscaled climate projections and the Physical Chemistry Fire Frequency Model (PC2FM). Future fire probability is projected to both increase and decrease across the study region of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. Among all end-of-century projections, change in fire probabilities (CFPs) range from − 51 to + 240%. Greatest absolute increases in fire probability are shown for areas within the range of approximately 75 to 160 cm mean annual precipitation (MAP), regardless of climate model. Although fire is likely to become more frequent across the southcentral USA, spatial patterns may remain similar unless significant increases in precipitation occur, whereby more extensive areas with increased fire probability are predicted. Perhaps one of the most important results is illumination of climate changes where fire probability response (+, −) may deviate (i.e., tipping points). Fire regimes of southcentral US ecosystems occur in a geographic transition zone from reactant- to reaction-limited conditions, potentially making them uniquely responsive to different scenarios of temperature and precipitation changes. Identification and description of these conditions may help anticipate fire regime changes that will affect human health, agriculture, species conservation, and nutrient and water cycling.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Atkins PW (1986) Physical chemistry, 3rd edn. W.H. Freeman and Company, New York
Bailey RG (1995) Description of the ecoregions of the United States (2nd ed.). Misc. Pub. No. 1391, USDA Forest Service, Washington DC
Batllori E, Parisien M-A, Krawchuk MA, Moritz MA (2013) Climate change-induced shifts in fire for Mediterranean ecosystems. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 22:1118–1129
Bernard ML, Nimour N (2007) Wildfires, weather, and productivity In Butler BW, Cook W (comps) The fire environment: innovations, management, and policy; conference proceedings. USDA Forest Service RMRS-P-46CD, pp 7-26
Briggs JM, Knapp AK (1995) Interannual variability in primary production in tallgrass prairie: climate, soil moisture, topographic position, and fire as determinants of aboveground biomass. Amer J Bot 82:1024–1030
Chamrad AD, Box TW (1965) Drought-associated mortality of range grasses in south Texas. Ecol 46:780–785
Chandler C, Cheney P, Thomas P, Trabaud L, Williams D (1983) Fire in forestry. John Wiley & Sons, New York
Daly C, Gibson WP, Doggett M, Smith J, Taylor G (2004) Up-to-date monthly climate maps for the conterminous United States In Proceedings of the 14th American Meteorological Society conference on applied climatology, American Meteorological Society
Schweitzer DDC (2014) Restoration for the future: endpoints, targets, and indicators of progress and success. J Sustain For 33:S43–S65
Flato GM, Boer GJ, Lee WG, McFarlane NA, Ramsden D, Reader MC, Weaver AJ (2000) The Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis global coupled model and its climate. Clim Dyn 16:451–467
Gonzalez P, Nielson RP, Lenihan JM, Drapek RJ (2010) Global patterns in the vulnerability of ecosystems to vegetation shifts due to climate change. Global Ecol Biogeog 19:755–768
Gordon C, Cooper C, Senior CA, Banks H, Gregory JM, Johns TC, Mitchell JFB, Wood RA (2000) The simulation of SST, sea ice extents and ocean heat transports in a version of the Hadley centre coupled model without flux adjustments. Clim Dyn 16:147–168
Guyette RP, Stambaugh MC, Dey DC, Muzika R-M (2012) Estimating fire frequency with the chemistry and climate. Ecosystems 15:322–335
Guyette RP, Thompson FR, Whittier J, Stambaugh MC, Dey DC (2014) Future fire probability modeling with climate change data and physical chemistry. For Sci 60:862–870
Guyette RP, Stambaugh MC, Marschall JM, Abadir ER (2015) An analytic approach to climate dynamics and fire frequency in the Great Plains. Great Plains Res 25:139–150
Guyette RP, Stambaugh MC, Dey DC, Muzika R-M (2017) The theory, direction, and magnitude of ecosystem fire probability as constrained by precipitation and temperature. PLoS One
Hanson PR, Arbogast AF, Johnson WC, Joeckel RM, Young AR (2010) Megadroughts and late Holocene dune activation at the eastern margin of the Great Plains, north-central Kansas, USA. Aeolian Res 1:101–110
Harris DC (1987) Quantitative chemical analysis. W.H. Freeman and Company, New York
Hoover K, Bracmort K (2015) Wildfire management: federal funding and related statistics. Report R43077, Congressional Research Service, Washington DC
IPCC (2012) Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation: a special report of working groups i and ii of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Keeley JE, Syphard A (2016) Climate change and future fire regimes: examples from California. Geosciences 6:37. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences6030037
Krawchuk MA, Moritz MA, Parisien M-A, Van Dorn J, Hayhoe K (2009) Global pyrogeography: the current and future distribution of wildfire. PLoS One 4:e5102
Lafon CW, Naito AT, Grissino-Mayer HD, Horn SP, Waldrop TA (2017) Fire history of the Appalachian region: a review and synthesis. GTR SRS-219. USDA Forest Service, Asheville, NC
Margolis EQ, Woodhouse CA, Swetnam TW (2017) Drought, multi-seasonal climate, and wildfire in northern New Mexico. Clim Chang 142:433–446
McNab WH, Cleland DT, Freeouf JA, Keys JE Jr, Nowacki GJ, Carpenter CA (2007) Description of ecological subregions: sections of the conterminous United States [CD-ROM]. GTR WO-76B. USDA Forest Service, Washington DC
Melillo JM, McGuire AD, Kicklighter DW, Moore B III, Vorosmarty CJ, Schloss AL (1993) Global climate change and terrestrial net primary production. Nature 363:234–240
Mensing S, Livingston S, Barker P (2006) Long-term fire history in Great Basin sagebrush reconstructed from macroscopic charcoal in spring sediments, Newark Valley, Nevada. West N Amer Nat 66:64–77
Mitchell RJ, Liu Y, O’Brien JJ, Elliott KJ, Starr G, Miniat CF, Hiers JK (2014) Future climate and fire interactions in the southeastern region of the United States. For Ecol Manag 327:316–326
Moritz MA et al (2014) Learning to coexist with wildfire. Nature 515:58–66. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13946
Moritz MA, Parisien M-A, Batllori E, Krawchuk MA, Van Dorn J, Ganz DJ, Hayhoe K (2012) Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity. Ecosphere 3:1–22
Muhs DR, Maat PB (1993) The potential response of eolian sands to greenhouse warming and precipitation reduction on the Great Plains of the USA. J Arid Environ 25:351–361
NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (2009) Ocean simulation based on MOM4-beta2 release, Version: 4. NOAA/GFDL, Princeton University, Princeton
North M, Collins BM, Stephens S (2012) Using fire to increase the scale, benefits, and future maintenance of fuels treatments. J Forestry 110:392–401
Noss RF (2012) Forgotten grasslands of the south: natural history and conservation. Island Press, Washington DC
Parisien MA, Moritz MA (2009) Environmental controls on the distribution of wildfire at multiple spatial scales. Ecol Monogr 79:127–154
Parisien MA, Snetsinger S, Greenberg JA, Nelson CR, Schoennagel T, Dobrowski SZ, Moritz MA (2012) Spatial variability in wildfire probability across the western United States. Int J Wildl Fire 21:313–327
Pierce D (2014) ncdf: Interface to Unidata netCDF data files. R package version 1.6.8. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ncdf
Power MJ et al (2008) Changes in fire regimes since the Last Glacial Maximum: an assessment based on a global synthesis and analysis of charcoal data. Clim Dyn 30:887–907
Pyne SJ (2010) America’s fires, a historical context for practice. The Forest History Society, Durham
R Development Core Team (2008) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna
Risser PG (1988) Abiotic controls on primary productivity and nutrient cycles in North American grasslands In Pomeroy LR, Alberts JJ (eds) Concepts of Ecosystem Ecology, Ecological Studies (Analysis and Synthesis), vol 67, Springer, New York
Scasta JD, Weir JR, Stambaugh MC (2016) Droughts and wildfires in western U.S. rangelands. Rangelands 38:197–203
Stambaugh MC, Sparks JC, Abadir ER (2014) Historical pyrogeography of Texas. Fire Ecol 10:72–89
Stambaugh MC, Guyette RP, Stroh ED, Struckhoff MA, Whittier JB (2018) Future changes in southcentral U.S. wildfire probability due to climate change – Data. U.S. Geological Survey data release. https://www.doi.org/10.5066/F7PK0F4V
Strachan S, Daly C (2017) Testing the daily PRISM air temperature model on semiarid mountain slopes. J Geophys Res Atmos https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JD025920
Stroh ED, Struckhoff MA, Stambaugh MC, Guyette RP (2018) Future fire and climate suitability for woody ecosystems in the south central United States. Fire Ecol (in press)
USDA (2015) The rising cost of fire operations: effects on the Forest Service’s non-fire work. Washington DC
Wright HA, Bailey AW (1982) Fire ecology. John Wiley & Sons, New York
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the National Science Foundation (NSF), Idaho EPSCoR, and the individual investigators responsible for the future climate projection data sets. In addition, we acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government.
Funding
This project was funded, in part, by the US Geological Survey, South Central Climate Science Center, in cooperation with the University of Missouri, Columbia and the Great Rivers Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Stambaugh, M.C., Guyette, R.P., Stroh, E.D. et al. Future southcentral US wildfire probability due to climate change. Climatic Change 147, 617–631 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2156-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2156-8