{"id":1495,"date":"2025-11-24T15:27:49","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T15:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/palaeoclimate\/?p=1495"},"modified":"2025-11-24T15:27:49","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T15:27:49","slug":"learning-about-arctic-boreal-fires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/palaeoclimate\/learning-about-arctic-boreal-fires\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning about Arctic-Boreal Fires"},"content":{"rendered":"

The SPECIAL group was pleased to welcome Sander Veraverbeke to give a guest seminar at the University of Reading in mid-November. Sander is an Associate Professor at the VU in Amsterdam, where he studies the interactions between climate change, terrestrial ecosystems, and the carbon cycle. His research focuses on how climate change affects ecosystem disturbances and carbon fluxes, and how these processes feed back into the climate system. You can read more about his work\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What are Arctic-Boreal fire regimes?<\/u><\/p>\n

For this seminar, Sander spoke about Arctic-Boreal fire regimes and the work his group has been doing on their spread, interactions with climate, and future management. Arctic-Boreal regions are experiencing increased fire activity compared to the rest of the world, with large fires occurring in Siberia, Alaska, and Canada over the past decade. These fires are typically ignited by dry-lightning storms and often grow into large events by merging from multiple smaller ignitions. There are also clear differences in intensity between the fires in the pine forests of Siberia and those found in the high latitudes of Canada.<\/p>\n

Although understanding Arctic-Boreal fires is complex, we do know that vegetation and climate are key drivers of the spatial patterns of fire. Attributing recent extreme fires to climate change, as well as understanding these spatial dynamics, are central topics of interest in the field. For example, warming in northern regions is occurring at a rate seven times higher than the global average (Li et al., 2024). Human management also plays a role in shaping the spread and location of fires in boreal regions, making it an important factor to consider when studying these regimes.<\/p>\n

Considering the limits to boreal fire growth<\/u><\/p>\n

One particularly interesting question Sander addressed was why these fires eventually go out. To understand how boreal fires spread in the future, it is crucial to examine the limits to their growth. A paper published in 2025 by Sander\u2019s group investigates this question by analyzing fire perimeters to determine what halts fire spread. Their findings show that changes in fire drivers (e.g. landscape cover, infrastructure, or water bodies) constrain fires either in space or in time. Weather changes define the temporal constraints, while landscape features impose spatial limits. This snippet of Figure 4 from Janssen and Veraverbeke (2025)<\/a> shows the different drivers of fire that caused the halting of one fire in these Arctic-Boreal Regions.<\/p>\n

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Figure taken from Janssen and Veraverbeke (2025, Figure 4<\/a>) showing the attribution of extinguishing fire pixels to the drivers of fire. <\/em><\/p>\n

We also had the opportunity to discuss:<\/p>\n