Fire is a major type of disturbance that could have important influences on ecosystem dynamics and carbon cycles. Yet our understanding of forest fire and its ecosystem consequences is still primitive, largely due to the difficulty of large scale fire monitoring and the complex interactions between fire, vegetation, climate, and anthropogenic factors. Here, using data from different approaches—government statistics, satellite-derived burning data, and ecosystem model simulations—we perform a comprehensive investigation of the spatial and temporal dynamics of China’s forest fire disturbances and their carbon emissions over the past six decades, with a focus on the recent period of 1997–2011 when data from all the three approaches are available.
Results/Conclusions
Our results show that 0.12–0.63% of forest area was burned annually during that period, which emitted about 7.8–11.7 TgC per year—equivalent to 9.8%–14.8% of China’s forest carbon sink. Boreal forest in Northeast China’s Daxing’anling region and subtropical dry forest in South Yunnan are consistently high in annual burned area and fire-induced carbon emissions from both the satellite product and the model simulations, with fire usually peaking in spring/autumn in the former region and spring/winter in the latter. Our results suggest that climate and vegetation play critical role in controlling the spatial and seasonal distribution of China’s forest fire disturbances, with anthropogenic factors having become increasingly important. Both advantages and disadvantages have been identified for satellite derived and model simulated fire data, and our findings highlight the importance of multiple complementary approaches in assessing forest fire disturbance and its carbon consequences. Further studies are required to improve the methods of observing and modelling China’s forest fire disturbances, which will provide valuable information for fire and ecosystem management in an era when both human activities and the natural environment are rapidly changing.