气候变化领域集成服务门户(CCPortal): Intensified burn severity in California's northern coastal mountains by drier climatic condition

CCPortal

DOI	10.1088/1748-9326/aba6af
	Intensified burn severity in California's northern coastal mountains by drier climatic condition
	Huang Y.; Jin Y.; Schwartz M.W.; Thorne J.H.
发表日期	2020
ISSN	17489318
卷号	15 期号:10
英文摘要	The severity of wildfire burns in interior lands of western US ecosystems has been increasing. However, less is known about its coastal mountain ecosystems, especially under extreme weather conditions, raising concerns about the vulnerability of these populated areas to catastrophic fires. Here we examine the fine-scale association between burn severity and a suite of environmental drivers including explicit fuel information, weather, climate, and topography, for diverse ecosystems in California's northern coastal mountains. Burn severity was quantified using Relative difference Normalized Burn Ratio from Landsat multispectral imagery during 1984-2017. We found a significant increasing trend in burned areas and severity. During low-precipitation years, areas that burned had much lower fuel moisture and higher climatic water deficit than in wetter years, and the percentage of high-severity areas doubled, especially during the most recent 2012-2016 drought. The random forest (RF) machine learning model achieved overall accuracy of 79% in classifying categories of burn severity. Aspect, slope, fuel type and availability, and temperature were the most important drivers, based on both classification and regression RF models. We further examined the importance of drivers under four climatic conditions: dry vs. wet years, and during two extended drought periods (the 2012-2016 warmer drought vs. the 1987-1992 drought). During warm and dry years, the spatial variability of burn severity was a mixed effect of slope, long-term minimum temperature, fuel amount, and fuel moisture. In contrast, climatic water deficit and short-term weather became dominant factors for fires during wetter years. These results suggest that relative importance of drivers for burn severity in the broader domain of California's northern coastal mountains varied with weather scenarios, especially when exacerbated by warm and extended drought. Our findings highlight the importance of targeting areas with high burn severity risk for fire adaptation and mitigation strategies in a changing climate and intensifying extremes. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
英文关键词	Artificial intelligence; Climate change; Drought; Extreme weather; Fire behavior; Remote sensing
语种	英语
scopus关键词	Decision trees; Ecosystems; Fuels; Landforms; Moisture; Topography; Water resources; Climatic conditions; Extreme weather conditions; Machine learning models; Minimum temperatures; Mitigation strategy; Mountain ecosystems; Multi-spectral imagery; Spatial variability; Drought; catastrophic event; climate conditions; climatic region; extreme event; mountain region; precipitation (climatology); satellite imagery; spatiotemporal analysis; wildfire; California; United States
来源期刊	Environmental Research Letters
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://gcip.llas.ac.cn/handle/2XKMVOVA/153667
作者单位	Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, University of California, Davis, CA, United States; Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA, United States
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Huang Y.,Jin Y.,Schwartz M.W.,et al. Intensified burn severity in California's northern coastal mountains by drier climatic condition[J],2020,15(10).
APA	Huang Y.,Jin Y.,Schwartz M.W.,&Thorne J.H..(2020).Intensified burn severity in California's northern coastal mountains by drier climatic condition.Environmental Research Letters,15(10).
MLA	Huang Y.,et al."Intensified burn severity in California's northern coastal mountains by drier climatic condition".Environmental Research Letters 15.10(2020).