Predicting wildfires over the long term requires understanding how ecosystem composition will shift in tandem with fire under climate change.
With an increase in wildfire frequency and a longer wildfire season, there’s cause for concern that the forest landscapes and local microclimates, soil properties, and biota altered by wildfires will emerge less resilient. Our ability to project how resilient forests will be over the long-term–and how well they continue to function to keep carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere–depends on understanding the feedbacks among drought, wildfire, and the shifts in vegetation caused by fire. Berkeley Lab scientists are working to assess, develop, and improve models to accurately predict wildfire risk on monthly timescales or on hourly timescales for early warning.
Forest Regrowth Following Fires
EESA researchers are leading the development of the demographic vegetation model Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES). The SPITFIRE (SPread and InTensity of FIRE) model integrated in FATES allows for studies of forest regrowth following fires. ( Holm et al. 2020 , Koven et al. 2020 ) When coupled with an Earth System Model such as E3SM2, FATES allows representation of potential ecosystem responses to available environmental resources such as water, climate, and atmospheric compositional changes at local to regional scales–which is helping model wildfire and vegetation distribution in the Western U.S.
The Influence of Wildfires on Alaskan Deciduous Forest
In 2019 published research, Zelalem Mekonnen and Bill Riley projected that climate change combined with increased wildfires will cause Alaska’s iconic evergreen conifer trees to get pushed out in favor of broadleaf deciduous trees. Their belief that this shift in vegetation could impact the degree to which the forest can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is the focus of their next study. In addition, the Berkeley Lab scientists are now applying a similar approach to modeling the effects of the 2013 Rim Fire on California forests.
Modeling Framework for Land Use Policy Planning
Berkeley Lab research could support the ability of policy makers to make informed decisions about mitigating the severity of California wildfires. Our scientists have developed a modeling framework for comparing the impact of factors such as wildfire, land use, and land cover change on statewide net annual greenhouse gas emissions. Their work, detailed here, showed that wildfire has the greatest effect on the landscape’s potential to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.
ELM-FATES Sensitivity to Forest Disturbances and Regrowth in the Central Amazon
Using remote-sensing data from the Tropics, research led by EESA has found that of the three most-common tree disturbances in the Amazon–fires, clearcuts, and wind throws–forest regrowth from fires takes the longest time (Negrón-Juárez et al. 2018), an important finding because the number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon has increased in recent years. An additional study by Negrón-Juárez et al. shows the potential of using Landsat imagery data for mapping forest regrowth from different types of disturbances including clearcutting and prescribed fire in forested areas.
Mobile Biorefinery to Reduce Wildfire Risk
Biosciences Area researchers are part of the CARIBOU mobile biorefinery project, which aims to deploy a technology that would reduce wildfire risk by converting wood and brush generated by forest thinning operations into biofuels, biopower, and biochar. An estimated 1 billion tons of biomass will be available in the U.S. by 2030, and in 2017 alone 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere due to wildfires. Mobile biorefineries could produce 50 million gallons of biofuel from forest waste biomass while reducing wildfire risk and promoting healthy forests. This CALFIRE-funded project is managed by the Research Foundation for SUNY (the State University of New York).