Biophysic and socioeconomic drivers of burned area and carbon emissions from fires in the Pantropical tropical dry forests

The global burned area declined by nearly one-quarter between 1998 and 2015. Drylands contain a large proportion of these global fires but there are important differences within the drylands, e.g., savannas and tropical dry forests (TDF). Savannas, a biome fire-prone and fire-adapted, have reduced the burned area, while the fire in the TDF is one of the most critical factors impacting biodiversity and carbon emissions. Moreover, under climate change scenarios TDF is expected to increase its current extent and raise the risk of fires. Despite regional and global scale effects, and the influence of this ecosystem on the global carbon cycle, little effort has been dedicated to studying the influence of climate (seasonality and extreme events) and socioeconomic conditions of fire regimen in TDF. Here we use the Global Fire Emissions Database and, climate and socioeconomic metrics to better understand long-term factors explaining the variation in burned area and biomass in TDF at the Pantrop..., We used the Global Fire Emissions Database, Version 4.1 (GFED4s) (Randerson et al., 2018). GFED4s includes the monthly and daily fire burned above-ground biomass from 1997 to 2020, for all fire sizes including \"small fires”. Burned area covers the period 1997-2016. The information has a spatial resolution of 0.25 degrees. We included small fires to fully capture fire dynamics across the TDF in the Pantropic. To ensure that we dominantly evaluated the TDF ecosystem, we crossed the GFED4s database to the realms defined by Dinerstein et al. (2017), similar to others (Zubkova et al., 2019). The realms are redefined and updated from their previous version of the terrestrial ecoregions of the world (Olson et al., 2001). For this study, we included the Tropical & Subtropical Dry Broadleaf Forests and the TDF in Mato Grosso, Brazil (Biudes et al., 2022), and excluded the woody savannas from our analysis, such as the savannas of Africa, Australia, and South America (Lehmann et al., 2011; Mon...,