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Carbon cycle

Fire evolution split by continent

Nature Geoscience volume 8, pages 167–168 (2015)Cite this article

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Boreal forest fires tend to be more intense and lethal in North America than Eurasia. Differences in tree species composition explain these differences in fire regime, and lead to contrasting feedbacks to climate.

Forest fires are a frequent and critical part of the natural ecology of boreal forests in North America and Eurasia. They greatly influence the composition, function and structure of forest communities. However, the behaviour and impacts of fires differ substantially between the two continents1. North American boreal forests tend to experience very intense crown fires that kill entire stands of trees and lead to cycles of fire and forest regeneration. In Eurasia, boreal forest fires tend to be of lower intensity — they don't usually spread above the forest floor and have less severe impacts. These differences have important implications for climate feedbacks, as boreal forests contain approximately one-third of the global forest area and one-third of terrestrial carbon stocks, and carbon emissions can thus increase substantially with fire intensity. In addition, fire changes the albedo of the land surface — the amount of solar radiation that the land surface reflects — with subsequent effects on boreal air temperatures. High-intensity fires are more likely to destroy low-albedo forest canopies and thereby lead to higher reflectivity of the land surface, especially when the ground is snow-covered. This lowering of albedo is a cooling effect, and counters the warming from forest-fire emissions. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Rogers and colleagues2 show that differences in tree species composition between North American and Eurasion forests explain the differences in fire characteristics.

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Figure 1: Crown fire in a North American boreal forest.

DENNIS QUINTILIO

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Renewable Resources, Mike Flannigan is at the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2H1, Canada,

    Mike Flannigan

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  1. Mike Flannigan
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Correspondence to Mike Flannigan.

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Flannigan, M. Fire evolution split by continent. Nature Geosci 8, 167–168 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2360

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