The climate space of fire regimes in north‐western North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim Studies of fire activity along environmental gradients have been undertaken, but the results of such studies have yet to be integrated with fire‐regime analysis. We characterize fire‐regime components along climate gradients and a gradient of human influence. Location We focus on a climatically diverse region of north‐western North America extending from northern British Columbia, Canada, to northern Utah and Colorado, USA . Methods We used a multivariate framework to collapse 12 climatic variables into two major climate gradients and binned them into 73 discrete climate domains. We examined variation in fire‐regime components (frequency, size, severity, seasonality and cause) across climate domains. Fire‐regime attributes were compiled from existing databases and Landsat imagery for 1897 large fires. Relationships among the fire‐regime components, climate gradients and human influence were examined through bivariate regressions. The unique contribution of human influence was also assessed. Results A primary climate gradient of temperature and summer precipitation and a secondary gradient of continentality and winter precipitation in the study area were identified. Fire occupied a distinct central region of such climate space, within which fire‐regime components varied considerably. We identified significant interrelations between fire‐regime components of fire size, frequency, burn severity and cause. The influence of humans was apparent in patterns of burn severity and ignition cause. Main conclusions Wildfire activity is highest where thermal and moisture gradients converge to promote fuel production, flammability and ignitions. Having linked fire‐regime components to large‐scale climate gradients, we show that fire regimes – like the climate that controls them – are a part of a continuum, expanding on models of varying constraints on fire activity. The observed relationships between fire‐regime components, together with the distinct role of climatic and human influences, generate variation in biotic communities. Thus, future changes to climate may lead to ecological changes through altered fire regimes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".