Pyrogeography across the western Palearctic: A diversity of fire regimes

We characterised fire regimes and estimated fire regime parameters (area burnt, size, intensity, season, patchiness, pyrodiversity) at broad spatial scales using remotely sensed individual-fire data. Specifically, we focused on the western part of the Palearctic realm, i.e., Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. We first divided the study area into eight large ecoregions based on their environment and vegetation (ecoregions): Mediterranean, Arid, Atlantic, Mountains, Boreal, Steppes, Continental, and Tundra. Then we intersected each ecoregion with individual-fire data obtained from remote sensing hotspots to estimate fire regime parameters for each environment. This allowed us to compute annual area burnt, fire size, fire intensity, fire season, fire patchiness, fire recurrence, and pyrodiversity for each ecoregion. We then related those fire parameters with the ecoregions’ climate and analysed the temporal trends in fire size. The results suggest that fire regime parameters vary acr...