What climate drivers control US vegetation wildfire resilience, temperature or precipitation?
Abstract
It remains unknown what climate drivers control US vegetation resilience to wildfire. Exploring the knowledge gap is an emergent priority in efforts to make US terrestrial resources sustainable given the land is warming and drying, and wildfire frequency is increasing. Here, we used satellite data and wildfire records to investigate how changing climate affected vegetation resilience across different vegetation types in the US over last decades. We found that wildfire resilience of three vegetation types is decreasing from 1984 to 2015. The causes of their resilience decline are likely attributed to: (1) positive correlation between recovery and annual mean precipitation for evergreen needleleaf forest and open shrubland; and (2) negative correlation between resistance and annual mean temperature for grassland. These results implied that, recovery after fire is a precipitation-dominated process while resistance to fire is a temperature-dominated process with considerable influence from precipitation as well.
Keywords: vegetation resistance, recovery, resilience, climate change Acknowledgments: C.Y. was supported by City University of New York, PSC-CUNY ENHC-48-33 and PSC-CUNY CIRG- 80209-08 22.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.B13H2232Y
- Keywords:
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- 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0426 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1818 Evapotranspiration;
- HYDROLOGY