Annual area burned by large fires (>200 hectares) across Canada

The fire regime describes the patterns of fire seasonality, frequency, size, spatial continuity, intensity, type (e.g., crown or surface fire) and severity in a particular area or ecosystem. Annual area burned is the average surface area burned annually in Canada by large fires (greater than 200 hectares (ha)). Changes in annual area burned were estimated using Homogeneous Fire Regime (HFR) zones. These zones represent areas where the fire regime is similar over a broad spatial scale (Boulanger et al. 2014). Such zonation is useful in identifying areas with unusual fire regimes that would have been overlooked if fires had been aggregated according to administrative and/or ecological classifications. Fire data comes from the Canadian National Fire Database covering 1959–1999 (for HFR zones building) and 1959-1995 (for model building). Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) modeling was used to relate monthly fire regime attributes with monthly climatic/fire-weather in each HFR zone. Future climatic data were simulated using the Canadian Earth System Model version 2 (CanESM2) and downscaled at a 10 Km resolution using ANUSPLIN for two different Representative Concentration…

Publisher

Natural Resources Canada

Resources

5

Catalogue metadata updated

2022-02-07