Land cover, more than monthly fire weather, drives fire-size distribution in Southern Quebec forests: Implications for fire risk management.

ABSTRACT: Fire activity in North American forests is expected to increase substantially with climate change. This would represent a growing risk to human settlements and industrial infrastructure proximal to forests, and to the forest products industry. We modelled fire size distributions in southern Québec as functions of fire weather and land cover, thus explicitly integrating some of the biotic interactions and feedbacks in a forest-wildfire system. We found that, contrary to expectations, land-cover and not fire weather was the primary driver of fire size in our study region. Fires were highly selective on fuel-type under a wide range of fire weather conditions: specifically, deciduous forest, lakes and to a lesser extent recently burned areas decreased the expected fire size in their vicinity c

SUBMITTER: Marchal J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5469487 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature