Wildfire forest habitat groupings

Three fire-related groupings of forest habitats based on the frequency of wildfire: wildfire-frequent, wildfire-occasional, and wildfire-rare. These groupings were guided by the IUCN global ecosystem typology (Keith et al., 2022), with the wildfire-frequent group including forests where recurrent fire typically occurs in at intervals of ~10-100 years, the wildfire-occasional group including forests where recurrent fire typically occurs at intervals of more than 100 years, and the wildfire rare group including forests where recurrent fire was not identified as a major component of the ecosystem. The wildfire-frequent group included boreal and temperate high montane forest, temperate pyric humid forest, and temperate pyric sclerophyll forests. The wildfire-occasional group included oceanic cool temperate rainforest, tropical dry forest, deciduous temperate forest, and warm temperate laurophyll forest. The wildfire-rare group included tropical/subtropical lowland rainforest, tropical/subtropical montane rainforest, and tropical heath forest. Rasters of terrestrial forest ecosystem functional groups were sourced from Keith et al., (2023) and collated into overall maps of each wildfire group. These maps were then processed to resolve any cells where groups overlapped, with cells of maximum occurrence (areas where the ecosystem functional group is very likely to occur) prioritised over cells of minimum occurrence (areas where the ecosystem functional group is dispersed within a matrices of other functional groups), cells of wildfire-frequent ecosystem groups prioritised over wildfire-rare or wildfire-occasional groups, and cells of wildfire-rare groups prioritised over wildfire-occasional groups.
Keith, David A., José R. Ferrer-Paris, Emily Nicholson, et al. 2022. ‘A Function-Based Typology for Earth’s Ecosystems’. Nature 610 (7932): 513–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05318-4.
Keith, David A., Jose R. Ferrer-Paris, Emily Nicholson, and Richard T. Kingsford. 2023. ‘Indicative Distribution Maps for Ecosystem Functional Groups - Level 3 of IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology’. Zenodo, November 8. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10081251.