Spatial and temporal patterns of global burned area in response to anthropogenic and environmental factors: Reconstructing global fire history for the 20th and early 21st centuries

Fire is a critical component of the Earth system, and substantially influences land surface, climate change, and ecosystem dynamics. To accurately predict the fire regimes in the 21st century, it is essential to understand the historical fire patterns and recognize the interaction among fire, human, and environment factors. Until now, few efforts are put on the studies regarding to the long-term fire reconstruction and the attribution analysis of anthropogenic and environmental factors to fire regimes at global scale. To fill this knowledge gap, we developed a 0.5° × 0.5° data set of global burned area from 1901 to 2007 by coupling Global Fire Emission Database version 3 with a process-based fire model and conducted factorial simulation experiments to evaluate the impacts of human, climate, and atmospheric components. The average global burned area is ~442 × 104 km2 yr−1 during 1901–2007 and our results suggest a notable declining rate of burned area globally (1.28 × 104 km2 yr−1). Burned area in tropics and extratropics exhibited a significant declining trend, with no significant trend detected at high latitudes. Factorial experiments indicated that human activities were the dominant factor in determining the declining trend of burned area in tropics and extratropics, and climate variation was the primary factor controlling the decadal variation of burned area at high latitudes. Elevated CO2 and nitrogen deposition enhanced burned area in tropics and southern extratropics but suppressed fire occurrence at high latitudes. Rising temperature and frequent droughts are becoming increasingly important and expected to increase wildfire activity in many regions of the world.