Fire Frequency and Related Land-Use and Land-Cover Changes in Indonesia’s Peatlands

Abstract

Indonesia's converted peatland areas have a well-established fire problem, but limited studies have examined the frequency with which they are burning. Here, we quantify fire frequency in Indonesia's two largest peatland regions, Sumatra and Kalimantan, during 2001-2018. We report, annual areas burned, total peatland area affected by fires, amount of recurrent burning and associations with land-use and land-cover (LULC) change. We based these analyses on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Terra/Aqua combined burned area and three Landsat-derived LULC maps (1990 and explored relationships between burning and land-cover types. Cumulative areas burned amounted nearly half of the surface areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan but were concentrated in only~25% of the land areas. Although peatlands cover only 13% of Sumatra and Kalimantan, annual percentage of area burning in these areas was almost five times greater than in non-peatlands (2.8% vs. 0.6%) from 2001 to 2018. Recurrent burning was more prominent in Kalimantan than Sumatra. Average fire-return intervals (FRI) in peatlands of both regions were short, 28 and 45 years for Kalimantan and Sumatra, respectively. On average, forest FRI were less than 50 years. In non-forest areas, Kalimantan had shorter average FRI than Sumatra (13 years vs. 40 years), with ferns/low shrub areas burning most frequently. Our findings highlight the significant influence of LULC change in altering fire regimes. If prevalent rates of burning in Indonesia's peatlands are not greatly reduced, peat swamp forest will disappear from Sumatra and Kalimantan in the coming decades.Intact peatlands are wetlands that rarely burn. However, since peatlands have been drained for uses other than natural forest, peatlands have become flammable and progressively more degraded. Over the last two decades, fire events have become common. Several authors have investigated this fire activity and the underlying causes from social and political perspectives [9][10][11], but the effects of physical constraints on the spatial and temporal patterns of fire occurrence have been less studied [12], including the analysis of fire frequency itself.Fire frequency, one of the key components characterizing a fire regime, is mostly described in publications using fire-affected area or fire density (for e.g., [13,14], fire accumulation or occurrences [15], or annual mean frequency of fire [16]). The common landscape approach for quantifying fire frequency is to quantify how many times fire affects a given amount of area over a defined time period, instead of the probability of burning across the entire landscape. We investigated fire frequency in Indonesia's peatlands, for the 2001-2018 period, to define how burning, and specifically recurrent fire, is associated with land-use and land-cover (LULC) types.Understanding fire regimes is critical, not only to identify fire pattern changes in ecosystems but also to generate related assessments of forest regeneration potential [17], fire management [18], human im...

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