Analysis of forest fire dynamics, distribution and main drivers in the Atlantic forest
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Author(s)
Singh, Minerva
Huang, Zhuhua
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The fire susceptibility of the Atlantic Forest has largely increased over the past two decades due to a combination of climate change and anthropogenic factors such as land cover change and human modification. High rates of forest fragmentation have contributed to escalating fires in this imperilled global biodiversity hotspot. Understanding fire patterns is essential to developing an effective forest fire management strategy. In this research, we utilized the Random Forest (RF) machine learning approach for identifying the role of climatic and anthropogenic factors in influencing fire occurrence probability and mapping the spatial distribution of fire risk. We found that the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index value and climate variables (i.e., temperature and solar radiation) were significant drivers of fire occurrence risk. Results also confirm that forest fragmentation increases with fire density in the region.
Date Issued
2022-01-17
Date Acceptance
2022-01-10
Citation
Sustainability, 2022, 14 (2), pp.1-15
ISSN
2071-1050
Publisher
MDPI AG
Start Page
1
End Page
15
Journal / Book Title
Sustainability
Volume
14
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2022 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Identifier
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/2/992
Subjects
12 Built Environment and Design
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 992
Date Publish Online
2022-01-17