FIRE-LANDES

The 2022 fire season in France has demonstrated that areas previously thought to have little chance of burning, such as the Landes de Gascogne area (LGA), are becoming increasingly flammable as the climate continues to warm and dry. Recent increases in area burned in France and elsewhere globally suggest area burned responses nonlinearly to climate change in forest ecosystems. Our understanding of fire behaviour and its effects has been developed under the narrow, modern-day, range of environmental condition. A more comprehensive understanding of the area burned in response to increased atmospheric warming is key to improve our ability to forecast how climate and wildfire will interact to shape ecosystems and impact society. The objective of our project is to improve our ability to project future climate-wildfire interactions in the LGA by leveraging paleo-data (paleo-fire and paleo-vegetation) and modelling to capture a larger portion of the natural range of variability in ecosystem flammability. We will use the LANDIS-II forest landscape succession and disturbance model, parameterized with paleo data, to run simulations over the past 3000 years to quantify how vegetation and area burned changed under a wider range of climatic conditions. We will use this understanding to simulate the study area into the future using projected climate data to quantify how landscape flammability changes as a function of vegetation composition and climate. The results of this project will provide key information on fire activity under changing climate and support the development of mitigation strategies.