The status and challenge of global fire modelling
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
Abstract. Biomass burning impacts vegetation dynamics, biogeochemical cycling, atmospheric chemistry, and climate, with sometimes deleterious socio-economic impacts. Under future climate projections it is often expected that the risk of wildfires will increase. Our ability to predict the magnitude and geographic pattern of future fire impacts rests on our ability to model fire regimes, using either well-founded empirical relationships or process-based models with good predictive skill. While a large variety of models exist today, it is still unclear which type of model or degree of complexity is required to model fire adequately at regional to global scales. This is the central question underpinning the creation of the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), an international initiative to compare and evaluate existing global fire models against benchmark data sets for present-day and historical conditions. In this paper we review how fires have been represented in fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and give an overview of the current state of the art in fire-regime modelling. We indicate which challenges still remain in global fire modelling and stress the need for a comprehensive model evaluation and outline what lessons may be learned from FireMIP.
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Global models continue to improve their representation of fire frequency, burned area and seasonality across years to decades.
“Further, coupled weather-fire models now capture the unfolding of complex landscape-scale events over a period of days (Coen, Stavros, & Fites-Kaufman, 2018), while global models continue to improve their representation of fire frequency, burned area and seasonality across years to decades (Forkel et al., 2019;Hantson et al., 2016).”
From Fire as a fundamental ecological process: Research advances and frontiers (2020) · cites this paper as Hantson et al., 2016
Cites
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“The Regional Fire Model (Reg-FIRM: Venevsky et al., 2002) introduced a new approach in fire modelling by simulating burnt area as the product of number of fires and average fire size.”
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“…now capture the unfolding of complex landscape-scale events over a period of days (Coen, Stavros, & Fites-Kaufman, 2018), while global models continue to improve their representation of fire frequency, burned area and seasonality across years to decades (Forkel et al., 2019; Hantson et al., 2016).”
Climate, ecosystems, and planetary futures: The challenge to predict life in Earth system models
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Ozone—climate interactions and effects on solar ultraviolet radiation
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“We then compared the data-and model-derived emergent relationships and sensitivities both globally and on a per grid cell basis.”
Self-citation
- Authors
- Hantson, S., Arneth, A., Harrison, S. P., Kelley, D. I., Prentice, I. C., Rabin, S. S., Archibald, S., Mouillot, F., Arnold, S. R., Artaxo, P., Bachelet, D., Ciais, P., Forrest, M., Friedlingstein, P., Hickler, T., Kaplan, J. O., Kloster, S., Knorr, W., Lasslop, G., Li, F., Mangeon, S., Melton, J. R., Meyn, A., Sitch, S., Spessa, A., van der Werf, G. R., Voulgarakis, A., & Yue, C.
- Affiliations
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)
- University of Reading (GB)
- Imperial College London (GB)
- Princeton University (US)
- University of the Witwatersrand (ZA)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- University of Leeds (GB)
- Universidade de São Paulo (BR)
- Oregon State University (US)
- Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (DE)
- University of Exeter (GB)
- Goethe University Frankfurt (DE)
- University of Lausanne (CH)
- Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (DE)
- Lund University (SE)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Environment and Climate Change Canada (CA)
- The Open University (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Hantson, Stijn
- ORCID
- Hantson, Stijn
- Arneth, Almut
- Harrison, Sandy P.
- Kelley, Douglas I.
- Prentice, I. Colin
- Rabin, Sam S.
- Archibald, Sally
- Mouillot, Florent
- Arnold, Steve R.
- Artaxo, Paulo
- Bachelet, Dominique
- Ciais, Philippe
- Forrest, Matthew
- Friedlingstein, Pierre
- Hickler, Thomas
- Kaplan, Jed O.
- Kloster, Silvia
- Knorr, Wolfgang
- Lasslop, Gitta
- Li, Fang
- Melton, Joe R.
- Sitch, Stephen
- van der Werf, Guido R.
- Voulgarakis, Apostolos
- Yue, Chao
- Venue
- Biogeosciences
- Publisher
- Copernicus GmbH
- Published
- 2016-06-09
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 3359-3375
- ISSN
- 1726-4170 (ISSN-L)
- 1726-4189
- OpenAlex
- W2301696792
- Cited by
- 460
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 35 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 64 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 63 · 2021: 72 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 60 · 2018: 30 · 2017: 26 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 30.41
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Biogeosciences (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Open Research Exeter (University of Exeter) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- VU Research Portal (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- SERVAL (Université de Lausanne) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- CentAUR (University of Reading) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) (acceptedVersion)
- Open Research Online (The Open University) (acceptedVersion)
- Repository KITopen (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- IRIS (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Max Planck Digital Library (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion)
- Informationszentrum Lebenswissenschaften (ZB MED) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Lund University Publications (Lund University) (submittedVersion)
- Open Research Exeter (University of Exeter) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Publication Server of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Goethe University Frankfurt) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Spiral (Imperial College London) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- KITopen (other-oa)
- Funders
- Seventh Framework Programme (603445, 603542)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Fire effects on ecosystems
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Forest Management and Policy
- Keywords
- fire regimes, dynamic global vegetation models, model intercomparison, model evaluation, biomass burning, wildfire risk, fire-climate interactions, vegetation dynamics
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