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Pre-fire Vegetation Conditions and Topography Shape Burn Mosaics of Siberian Tundra Fire Scars
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  • Nils Rietze,
  • Ramona Julia Heim,
  • Elena Troeva,
  • Gabriela Schaepman-Strub,
  • Jakob J Assmann
Nils Rietze
Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Sciences, University of Zurich

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Ramona Julia Heim
University of Münster
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Elena Troeva
Institute for Biological Problems of the Cryolithozone, Siberian Branch Russian Academy of Sciences
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Gabriela Schaepman-Strub
University of Zürich
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Jakob J Assmann
University of Zurich
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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.
18 Nov 2024Submitted to ESS Open Archive
18 Nov 2024Published in ESS Open Archive