Global ecosystems and fire: Multi‐model assessment of fire‐induced tree‐cover and carbon storage reduction

Lasslop, Gitta; Hantson, Stijn; Harrison, Sandy P.; Bachelet, Dominique; Burton, Chantelle; Forkel, Matthias; Forrest, Matthew; Li, Fang; Melton, Joe R.; Ye, Chao; Archibald, Sally; Scheiter, Simon; Arneth, Almut; Hickler, Thomas; Sitch, Stephen

doi:10.1111/gcb.15160

Cited by 83 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…2b). This effect of fire has also been shown by Lasslop et al [42]. Nonetheless, the impact of fire on the decrease and increase biomass was small in the impact and recovery phase.…”

Section: The Hysteresis Of the Tropical Forestsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…Previous studies suggest temperature stress on the vegetation as the cause for this large reduction [41]. Without fire, the total biomass was ca 25% larger, due to missing combustion and fire-related tree mortality [42]. In the recovery phase, atmospheric CO 2 decreased over another 350 years, until the starting value of 284 ppm was reached.…”

Section: Trajectories Of Tropical Biomass and Temperaturementioning

confidence: 93%

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Climate-induced hysteresis of the tropical forest in a fire-enabled Earth system model

Drüke

Bloh

Sakschewski

et al. 2021

Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top.

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Tropical rainforests are recognized as one of the terrestrial tipping elements which could have profound impacts on the global climate, once their vegetation has transitioned into savanna or grassland states. While several studies investigated the savannization of, e.g., the Amazon rainforest, few studies considered the influence of fire. Fire is expected to potentially shift the savanna-forest boundary and hence impact the dynamical equilibrium between these two possible vegetation states under changing climate. To investigate the climate-induced hysteresis in pan-tropical forests and the impact of fire under future climate conditions, we employed the Earth system model CM2Mc, which is biophysically coupled to the fire-enabled state-of-the-art dynamic global vegetation model LPJmL. We conducted several simulation experiments where atmospheric CO$$_2$$ 2 concentrations increased (impact phase) and decreased from the new state (recovery phase), each with and without enabling wildfires. We find a hysteresis of the biomass and vegetation cover in tropical forest systems, with a strong regional heterogeneity. After biomass loss along increasing atmospheric CO$$_2$$ 2 concentrations and accompanied mean surface temperature increase of about 4 $$^\circ $$ ∘ C (impact phase), the system does not recover completely into its original state on its return path, even though atmospheric CO$$_2$$ 2 concentrations return to their original state. While not detecting large-scale tipping points, our results show a climate-induced hysteresis in tropical forest and lagged responses in forest recovery after the climate has returned to its original state. Wildfires slightly widen the climate-induced hysteresis in tropical forests and lead to a lagged response in forest recovery by ca. 30 years.

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“…2b). This effect of fire has also been shown by Lasslop et al [42]. Nonetheless, the impact of fire on the decrease and increase biomass was small in the impact and recovery phase.…”

Section: The Hysteresis Of the Tropical Forestsupporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Trajectories Of Tropical Biomass and Temperaturementioning

confidence: 93%

Climate-induced hysteresis of the tropical forest in a fire-enabled Earth system model

Drüke

Bloh

Sakschewski

et al. 2021

Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top.

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“…The results showed that our model performed well in simulating most land variables (more details can be accessed from Note S3). In addition, noting that fire has an important effect on vegetation distribution 86,87 , we evaluated our simulated ''offline'' present-day global vegetation distribution (i.e., with fire included) by comparing it with the European Space Agency's Land Cover Climate Change Initiative dataset 47 (Note S3).…”

Section: Model Validationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical and future global burned area with changing climate and human demography

Venevsky

Sitch

et al. 2021

One Earth

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“…In this study, a process-based fire model of intermediate complexity has been implemented in the SSiB4/TRIFFID, called SSiB4/TRIFFID-Fire. The fire model developed by Li et al (2012Li et al ( , 2013 was first built on the model platform of CLM-DGVM and has been incorporated in IAP-DGVM (Zeng et al, 2014), CLM4.5 (Oleson et al, 2013, CLM5 (Lawrence et al, 2019), LM3 in Earth system model GFDL-ESM (Rabin et al, 2018;Ward et al, 2018), AVIM in Climate System Model BCC-CSM (Weiping Li, personal communication, 2016), E3SM Land Model (ELM; Ricciuto et al, 2018), NASA GEOS catchment-CN4.5 model (Zeng et al, 2019), and DLEM (Yang et al, 2014), and it has been partly used in GLASS-CTEM (Melton and Arora, 2016). The following briefly describes the fire schemes adapted from Li et al (2012, , and our own modifications.…”

Section: Fire Model and Modificationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling long-term fire impact on ecosystem characteristics and surface energy using a process-based vegetation–fire model SSiB4/TRIFFID-Fire v1.0

Huang

Xue

et al. 2020

Geosci. Model Dev.

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Abstract. Fire is one of the primary disturbances to the distribution and ecological properties of the world's major biomes and can influence the surface fluxes and climate through vegetation–climate interactions. This study incorporates a fire model of intermediate complexity to a biophysical model with dynamic vegetation, SSiB4/TRIFFID (The Simplified Simple Biosphere Model coupled with the Top-down Representation of Interactive Foliage and Flora Including Dynamics Model). This new model, SSiB4/TRIFFID-Fire, updating fire impact on the terrestrial carbon cycle every 10 d, is then used to simulate the burned area during 1948–2014. The simulated global burned area in 2000–2014 is 471.9 Mha yr−1, close to the estimate of 478.1 Mha yr−1 in Global Fire Emission Database v4s (GFED4s), with a spatial correlation of 0.8. The SSiB4/TRIFFID-Fire reproduces temporal variations of the burned area at monthly to interannual scales. Specifically, it captures the observed decline trend in northern African savanna fire and accurately simulates the fire seasonality in most major fire regions. The simulated fire carbon emission is 2.19 Pg yr−1, slightly higher than the GFED4s (2.07 Pg yr−1). The SSiB4/TRIFFID-Fire is applied to assess the long-term fire impact on ecosystem characteristics and surface energy budget by comparing model runs with and without fire (FIRE-ON minus FIRE-OFF). The FIRE-ON simulation reduces tree cover over 4.5 % of the global land surface, accompanied by a decrease in leaf area index and vegetation height by 0.10 m2 m−2 and 1.24 m, respectively. The surface albedo and sensible heat are reduced throughout the year, while latent heat flux decreases in the fire season but increases in the rainy season. Fire results in an increase in surface temperature over most fire regions.

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Global ecosystems and fire: Multi‐model assessment of fire‐induced tree‐cover and carbon storage reduction

Abstract: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Cited by 83 publications

References 75 publications

Climate-induced hysteresis of the tropical forest in a fire-enabled Earth system model

Climate-induced hysteresis of the tropical forest in a fire-enabled Earth system model

Historical and future global burned area with changing climate and human demography

Modeling long-term fire impact on ecosystem characteristics and surface energy using a process-based vegetation–fire model SSiB4/TRIFFID-Fire v1.0

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