Welcome to Future Fire

An informal newsletter about climate change, wildfire and everything

Taking stock: In the absence of photographic skills or interesting habits like fieldwork, I expect to rely regularly on stock photos to make my point. Here we see the plight of the mature age student. Everyone else has left by the time you arrive.

WTFF?

Welcome to the first of what I hope is many issues of Future Fire, concise thoughts about understanding and living with wildfire and climate change.

I’m doing this for a few reasons. I selfishly hope it will spur me to keep up with some of the many goings on in the world of fire and climate change research, and its myriad adjacent worlds. I believe it’s important for scientists and professionals of all stripes to share what they know (or suspect) with society. Also, I feel like writing.

I expect a fair whack of Future Fire to be dedicated to science itself – findings, methods, figures I like and don’t like and so on. But I dare say I’ll get into policy and practice from time to time (if only to reassure people I have no influence over them), plus the day to day reality of academic life and – fair warning – a broad range of obscure and idiosyncratic things that will be hopelessly biased towards my particular background and perspective.

One of the things I like about working in fire and climate change research is that it is a broad church. Getting a handle on a topic this complex requires humility [insert thought about arrogant scientist you know] and a willingness to stray quite far from one’s home discipline (hopefully with a friendly guide), in fact sometimes well outside the walls of academia. I hope to convey some of this diversity here.

My email is plastered all over the internet. It’s the Melbourne Uni one.

Networking: There is a vast constellation of actors in the fire and climate change space. On a clear night you can use them to find your way home from the office.

Four switches to rule them all

In 2010 Ross Bradstock wrote an influential paper in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography titled A biogeographic model of fire regimes in Australia: Current and future implications. In it, he argued that there are a small number of biophysical phenomena which, taken together, limit overall fire incidence. These are biomass (something to burn), fuel moisture (it won’t burn if it’s too damp), weather conditions (generally hot, dry and windy) and an ignition (natural or human source, take your pick). We can think of these phenomena as switches, all of which must be on for a reasonably large wildfire to occur.

Bradstock pointed out that different fire regimes in Australia – and by extension, around the world – are characterised by differences in the rates at which these four phenomena slide into the ‘on’ position, and thus in the identity of the switch that acts to limit overall fire incidence. The concept of a small number of fire-limiting switches is simple but powerful. Incidentally, it was independently introduced around the same time by Sally Archibald and colleagues in South Africa and the USA, in a paper published by the journal Global Change Biology.

What has this got to do with climate change? A useful place to start, when thinking about how climate change might affect wildfire, is to ask how it will affect each of the four biophysical constraints of fire i.e. vegetation, fuel availability, fire weather and ignitions.

In particular, we might like to think about the fire regime we are responsible for managing, or that we find ourselves living in, and ask how climate change will affect the phenomenon that currently poses the biggest barrier to overall fire activity. Are we somewhere with plenty of fuel, but infrequent drought? An increase in dryness may be far more consequential than a change in fuel amount in such a system.

What about fire regimes in hot, dry climates, where fuel is generally sparse except in the aftermath of major successive rainfall events? Bradstock’s paper suggests we should be more alert to changes in La Niña, for example, than general warming.

Shout out to…

Good visuals at the Shovel Creek StoryMap. I came for the Alaska Fire Science Consortium’s brilliant brochure about their local fire regimes but left with this sensational storymap about fire severity.

Questions while…

Waiting on a review @ an unnamed journal. Why is Reviewer 2 a month behind Reviewer 1? The downside of manuscript tracking is I can’t stop myself from tracking the damn manuscript.

Give a follow to…

Kimberly Nicholas: @KA_Nicholas. Sustainability scientist and Professor at Lund University, coined the pithiest of climate change summaries, does and shares a hell of a lot of interesting stuff.