Understanding feedbacks between wildfires, ecosystems, and climate change is essential to predicting whether and to what extent they will occur in the future.
Around the world climate change is driving increasingly severe fire weather that is characterized by hot, dry, and windy conditions and, despite wildfire’s importance, there is limited understanding of how strongly it will feed back to climate change. Accurate short-term predictions of wildfires have received less attention, and long-term projections do not account for ecosystem resilience to wildfires. Berkeley Lab scientists have wide-ranging expertise to apply to developing new scientific advancements in wildfire research through a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research effort that addresses the predictability of wildfire impacts. Their use of a variety of modeling and machine learning approaches to analyze and represent patterns of fire behavior and impacts will allow them to improve model representations of wildfire from local to continental to global scales.
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and Wildfire
Berkeley Lab Staff Scientist Charles Koven builds and tests climate models against data from around the world to understand how the carbon cycle evolves amid climate change, including its response to fire and other disturbance. He was a lead author of the carbon cycle chapter, which assessed global wildfire feedbacks to climate change, of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in August 2021, alongside three other Berkeley Lab scientists who contributed to the report Learn more about Berkeley Lab’s contributions to the Sixth Assessment Report here.
Fire As a Fundamental Ecological Process
Jacquelyn Shuman of the NGEE-Tropics project led by Berkeley Lab contributed to The Future of Fire Consortium, composed of ecologists from around the globe with expertise ranging from paleoecology to atmospheric science. The researchers identified critical research frontiers in six areas of fire ecology and three emergent themes for future fire ecology research including: (1) the need to study fire across temporal and spatial scales, (2) the need to assess the mechanisms underlying a variety of feedbacks in the fire system, and (3) the need to improve representation of fire in a range of modeling contexts.
Arctic Ecosystems’ Response to Wildfire
A recent study led by EESA scientist Nick Bouskill sought to improve what is known about how Arctic systems respond to wildfire. The team used environmental modeling to evaluate how these environments recover from wildfires, and how nutrient availability in these permafrost soils influences this recovery. Their work showed that over the first 5 years after the fire, faster-growing bacteria established colonies in areas of the soil that were previously occupied by slower-growing fungi. The study is described in a paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. (Bouskill et al. 2022)