Life Sciences Commons^™

Quantifying The Human Influence On Fire Ignition Across The Western Usa, Emily J. Fusco, John T. Abatzoglou, Jennifer K. Balch, John T. Finn, Bethany Bradley

Environmental Conservation Faculty Publication Series

Humans have a profound effect on fire regimes by increasing the frequency of ignitions. Although ignition is an integral component of understanding and predicting fire, to date fire models have not been able to isolate the ignition location, leading to inconsistent use of anthropogenic ignition proxies. Here, we identified fire ignitions from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) Burned Area Product (2000–2012) to create the first remotely sensed, consistently derived, and regionally comprehensive fire ignition data set for the western United States. We quantified the spatial relationships between several anthropogenic land-use/disturbance features and ignition for ecoregions within the study area …