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Monitoring fire regimes and assessing their driving factors in Central Asia

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Abstract

Relatively little is known about fire regimes in grassland and cropland in Central Asia. In this study, eleven variables of fire regimes were measured from 2001 to 2019 by utilizing the burned area and active fire product, which was obtained and processed from the GEE (Google Earth Engine) platform, to describe the incidence, inter-annual variability, peak month and size of fire in four land cover types (forest, grassland, cropland and bare land). Then all variables were clustered to define clusters of fire regimes with unique fire attributes using the K-means algorithm. Results showed that Kazakhstan (KAZ) was the most affected by fire in Central Asia. Fire regimes in cropland in KAZ had the frequent, large and intense characters, which covered large burned areas and had a long duration. Fires in grassland mainly occurred in central KAZ and had the small scale and high-intensity characters with different quarterly frequencies. Fires in forest were mainly distributed in northern KAZ and eastern KAZ. Although fires in grassland underwent a shift from more to less frequent from 2001 to 2019 in Central Asia, vigilance is needed because most fires in grassland occur suddenly and cause harm to humans and livestock.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA19030301). We are very grateful for vector data from countries and states provided by the Center for Spatial Sciences at the University of California, Davis. We thank the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) for sharing data on Google Earth Engine (GEE). We also acknowledge the GEE platform for providing various processing services. We are also very grateful to Prof. John ABATZOGLOU and others for providing the Terraclimate dataset on the GEE platform.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China

    Hanmin Yin, Jiapaer Guli, Liangliang Jiang, Tao Yu, Jeanine Umuhoza & Xu Li

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100039, China

    Hanmin Yin, Jiapaer Guli, Liangliang Jiang, Tao Yu, Jeanine Umuhoza & Xu Li

  3. Research Center for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China

    Jiapaer Guli

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  1. Hanmin Yin
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  2. Jiapaer Guli
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  4. Tao Yu
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  5. Jeanine Umuhoza
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Correspondence to Jiapaer Guli.

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Yin, H., Guli, J., Jiang, L. et al. Monitoring fire regimes and assessing their driving factors in Central Asia. J. Arid Land 13, 500–515 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40333-021-0008-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40333-021-0008-2

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