Fire regime from 1973 to 2011 in north-western Patagonian grasslands
Facundo José Oddi A B and Luciana Ghermandi A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Laboratorio Ecotono, Universidad Nacional del Comahue – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas, Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente, Quintral 1250, 8400 Bariloche, Argentina.
B Corresponding author. Email: foddi@unrn.edu.ar
International Journal of Wildland Fire 25(9) 922-932 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF15211
Submitted: 5 December 2015 Accepted: 24 May 2016 Published: 18 July 2016
Abstract
Fire is one of the most important disturbances in terrestrial ecosystems and has major ecological and socioeconomic impacts. Fire regime describes the variation of individual fire events in time and space. Few studies have characterised the fire regime in grasslands in spite of the importance of these ecosystems. The aim of this study was to describe the recent fire regime (from 1973 to 2011) of north-western Patagonian grasslands in terms of seasonality, frequency and burned area. Our study area covered 560 000 ha and we used a remote sensing approach combined with statistics obtained from operational databases. Fires occur during the summer in 2 of every 3 years with a frequency of 2.7 fires per year and a mean size of 823 ha. Fire size distribution is characterised by many small fires and few large ones which would respond to a distribution from the power law family. Eighty per cent of the total area affected by fire was burned in the span of a few years, which were also widespread fire years in forests and woodlands of north-western Patagonia. This work contributes to general knowledge about fire regimes in grasslands and we expect that our results will serve as a reference to further fire regime research.
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