Forest fires in Europe – Improved modeling accuracy at continental scale

A series of improvements were introduced to the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program’s standalone fire model (SFM) which quantitatively estimates climate impacts on forest fires in Europe.

© Bunyos | Dreamstime

© Bunyos | Dreamstime

Under historical climate (2000-2008) for 17 European countries the improved version of SFM is able to reproduce annual burned areas with accuracy unprecedented for a continental-scale model.

The validation of the modeled results was carried out using historical observations from the two publicly available datasets – European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) [1].

Figure 1. Annual burned areas by country as reported by latest datasets: European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and Global Fire Emissions Database version 4 (GFED), and modeled by SFM (in thousands of hectares) (click on image to enlarge).

References

[1] Krasovskii A, Khabarov N, Migliavacca M, Kraxner F, Obersteiner M, Regional aspects of modeling forest fires in Europe. International Journal of Wildland Fire [submitted].

Collaborators

Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany


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Last edited: 21 April 2015

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Nikolay Khabarov

Research Scholar Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

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