Pre-fire Vegetation Conditions and Topography Shape Burn Mosaics of
Siberian Tundra Fire Scars
Abstract
The fire season of 2020 in Siberia set a precedent for extreme
wildfires in the Arctic tundra. Large fires burned in the carbon-rich
permafrost landscape, releasing vast amounts of carbon, and changing
land surface processes by burning vegetation and organic soils. However,
little is known about the mosaics of burned and unburned patches formed
by tundra fires and the underlying processes that generate them. In this
study, we investigated six fire scars in the northeastern Siberian
tundra using high-resolution PlanetScope imagery (3 m) to map burned
fraction within the scars. We then used Bayesian mixed models to
identify which biotic and abiotic predictors influenced the burned
fraction. We observed high spatial variation in burned fraction across
all tundra landforms common to the region. Current medium-resolution
fire products could not capture this heterogeneity, thereby
underestimating the burned area of fire scars by a factor of 1.1 to 4.4.
The heterogeneity of the burn mosaic indicates a mix of burned and
unburned patches, with median unburned patch sizes being smaller than
180 to 324 m². Pre-fire land surface temperature, vegetation
heterogeneity and topography predicted burn fraction in our analysis,
matching factors previously shown to influence large-scale fire
occurrence in the Arctic. Future studies need to consider the fine-scale
heterogeneity within tundra landscapes to improve our understanding and
predictions of fire spread, carbon emissions, post-fire recovery and
ecosystem functioning.