Sponsor
This project was supported by grants from the Council for International Exchange of Scholars Fulbright US Scholars Program, the Facultad de Ciencias Forestales at the Universidad de Concepción, and National Science Foundation (GSS BCS-1539820 and OISE 0966472). AP and RG were partially supported by ICM P05-002, CONICYT AFB170008, and CONICYT PFB-23. RG was partially supported by CONICYT/FONDECYT 11170516. AH was partially supported by National Science Foundation award #1738104. MEG was supported by the Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR)2 (CONICYT/FONDAP/15110009) and CONICYT/Fondecyt N° 1171400.
Published In
PLOS ONE
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2018
Subjects
Applied ecology, Wildfires -- Chiles -- Effect of climatic changes on, Wildfires -- Chile -- Prevention and control
Abstract
In recent decades large fires have affected communities throughout central and southern Chile with great social and ecological consequences. Despite this high fire activity, the controls and drivers and the spatiotemporal pattern of fires are not well understood. To identify the large-scale trends and drivers of recent fire activity across six regions in south-central Chile (~32–40° S Latitude) we evaluated MODIS satellite-derived fire detections and compared this data with Chilean Forest Service records for the period 2001–2017. MODIS burned area estimates provide a spatially and temporally comprehensive record of fire activity across an important bioclimatic transition zone between dry Mediterranean shrublands/sclerophyllous forests and wetter deciduous-broadleaf evergreen forests. Results suggest fire activity was highly variable in any given year, with no statistically significant trend in the number of fires or mean annual area burned. Evaluation of the variables associated with spatiotemporal patterns of fire for the 2001–2017 period indicate vegetation type, biophysical conditions (e.g., elevation, slope), mean annual and seasonal climatic conditions (e.g., precipitation) and mean population density have the greatest influence on the probability of fire occurrence and burned area for any given year. Both the number of fires and annual area burned were greatest in warmer, biomass-rich lowland Bío-Bío and Araucanía regions. Resource selection analyses indicate fire ‘preferentially’ occurs in exotic plantation forests, mixed native-exotic forests, native sclerophyll forests, pasture lands and matorral, vegetation types that all provide abundant, flammable and connected biomass for burning. Structurally and compositionally homogenous exotic plantation forests may promote fire spread greater than native deciduous-Nothofagaceae forests which were once widespread in the southern parts of the study area. In the future, the coincidence of warmer and drier conditions in landscapes dominated by flammable and fuel-rich forest plantations and mixed native-exotic and sclerophyll forests are likely to further promote large fires in south-central Chile.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1371/journal. pone.0201195
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/26175
Citation Details
McWethy DB, Pauchard A, García RA, Holz A, González ME, et al. (2018) Landscape drivers of recent fire activity (2001-2017) in south-central Chile. PLOS ONE 13(8): e0201195.
Description
Copyright: © 2018 McWethy et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The data underlying this study are third party. The MODIS data are available from the NASA "Earthdata Search" Institutional database at the following URL: http://modis-fire.umd.edu/. The CONAF data are available from the following URL: http://www.conaf.cl/situacion-nacional-de-incendios-forestales/.