Grant: Discovery Development Grant

Fire drives the dynamics and ecosystem functions of the boreal forest and directly affects global carbon balance and concentrations of the atmospheric trace gases. Understanding multi-scale controls of fire activity is paramount for sound mechanistic modeling of past and future dynamics of this biome, and particularly - its response to future climatic changes. The main long-term objective of my research is to contribute towards understanding of long-term dynamics of circumboreal fire activity as a function of biogeographical and climatic factors. This knowledge should allow for sound modelling of the future fire activity, and specifically - in downscaling the large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns into estimates of future forest fire activity and assessing the resilience of the boreal biome under a range of climate conditions. The proposed project focuses on the boreal forests of Eastern North America and Northern Europe (BENANE), where the progress in this research is largely limited by (a) the availability of adequate reference datasets, and (b) limited understanding of complex climate-fire linkages. The proposed project will (A) establish a mechanistic relationship between climate variability, sub-regional biogeography, on one hand, and regional patterns of fire activity, on the other, putting a particular focus on years and periods with increased fire activity across BENANE region, and (B) calibrate a process-based modeling framework to project and analyze the effects of future climate on fire activity in BENANE, including dynamics of carbon emissions, changes in composition and dynamics of vegetation, forest carbon balance, and forest biomass and productivity. My overall hypothesis is that despite biogeographical differences within BENANE, differences in the dominating type of disturbance events (surface vs. stand replacing fires) and large geographical scale under consideration, there is a strong teleconnectivity patterns in sub-regional fire activity, which could be observed restrospecitvely at multiple temporal scales. This connectivity stems from large scale atmospheric circulation anomalies over the BENANE, which are related to the changes in the energy states of the system involving Northern Atlantic Ocean and associated atmospheric pressure patterns.