Global interactions between fire and vegetation, human activities and climate

Doutoramento em Engenharia Florestal - Instituto Superior de Agronomia - UL

Vegetation fires are an important component of the earth’s system land processes and have a significant impact on the vegetation and CO2 dynamics. The global fire patterns are not thoroughly explored and the drivers of fire regimes in global scale are interconnected. However, several modelling assumptions are contradicted by exploring those relationships partially. At global scale, fire extent is fuel limited, with climatic variables showing both positive and negative influence on fuel moisture conditions, and humans showing a negative net effect. When isolating the influence of population density and assuming spatial nonstationarity, the human impact is very detailed and reflects the main land use activities with emphasis on cropland and rangeland management at continental scale. The footprint of fire into the Earth system can be measured in terms of radiative forcing from pre and post-fire albedo changes, with the forest biomes driving the extremes on annual basis. Additionally this thesis explores the patterns and the trends of contemporary fire activity. Contrary to previous studies, the results show non-monotonic patterns at grid cell level. The findings of this thesis give a better insight into the spatial variability and the controls of fire at global scale using satellite derived datasets with a focus to the anthropogenic land use activities