Projecting future fire regimes in semiarid systems of the inland
northwestern U.S.: interactions among climate change, vegetation
productivity, and fuel dynamics
Abstract
Fire regimes are influenced by both exogenous drivers (e.g., increases
in atmospheric CO2; and climate change) and endogenous drivers (e.g.,
vegetation and soil/litter moisture), which constrain fuel loads and
fuel aridity. Herein, we identified how exogenous and endogenous drivers
can interact to affect fuels and fire regimes in a semiarid watershed in
the inland northwestern U.S. throughout the 21st century. We used a
coupled ecohydrologic and fire regime model to examine how climate
change and CO2 scenarios influence fire regimes over space and time. In
this semiarid watershed we found that, in the mid-21st century (2040s),
the CO2 fertilization effect on vegetation productivity outstripped the
effects of climate change-induced fuel decreases, resulting in greater
fuel loading and, thus, a net increase in fire size and burn
probability; however, by the late-21st century (2070s), climatic warming
dominated over CO2 fertilization, thus reducing fuel loading and fire
activity. We also found that, under future climate change scenarios,
fire regimes will shift progressively from being flammability to
fuel-limited, and we identified a metric to quantify this shift: the
ratio of the change in fuel loading to the change in its aridity. The
threshold value for which this metric indicates a flammability versus
fuel-limited regime differed between grasses and woody species but
remained stationary over time. Our results suggest that identifying
these thresholds in other systems requires narrowing uncertainty in
exogenous drivers, such as future precipitation patterns and CO2 effects
on vegetation.