Drivers of wildfire burn severity in the montane rainforests of northern Vietnam

Pham T. Trang; Neal J. Enright; Thuan Chu; Margaret E. Andrew

doi:10.1071/WF23026

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Previous Next Contents Vol 32(12)

Drivers of wildfire burn severity in the montane rainforests of northern Vietnam

Pham T. Trang ^A ^B , Neal J. Enright

^A , Thuan Chu ^C ^D and Margaret E. Andrew

^A ^*

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A School of Environmental and Conservation Sciences, Murdoch University, 90 South Street, Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia.

^B Faculty of Forest Resource and Environmental Management, Vietnam National University of Forestry, Xuan Mai, Chuong My, Hanoi, 10000, Vietnam.

^C Department of Geography and Planning, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, S7N5C8, Canada.

^D Faculty of Forestry, Vietnam National University of Forestry, Xuan Mai, Chuong My, Hanoi, 10000, Vietnam.

^* Correspondence to: m.andrew@murdoch.edu.au

International Journal of Wildland Fire 32(12) 1773-1787 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF23026

Submitted: 23 February 2023 Accepted: 1 November 2023 Published: 2 December 2023

Abstract

Background

Fire impacts and drivers of wildfire burn severity remain poorly understood for tropical forests.

Aims

To assess variation and environmental drivers of burn severity for nine forest fires in northern Vietnam.

Methods

Burn severity was estimated from satellite image analyses, and associations with a remotely sensed index of annual fuel production, topographic factors (elevation, slope, aspect) and weather variables (temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, wind speed) were evaluated.

Key results

High severity burn areas were found to be fairly uncommon and were associated with steeper, south-west facing slopes, higher elevations and lower fuel abundance. There was a weak tendency for higher burn severity on days with lower relative humidity.

Conclusions

Conditions that increase fire intensity and the dryness and flammability of fuels are important contributors to high severity fires in wet tropical systems. However, the pattern of higher burn severity at high elevation, where forests tend to be denser and more humid, is counter to this interpretation and may be due to species compositional changes and greater vulnerability of high-elevation forests to fire impacts.

Implications

Better understanding of fire risk and where in the montane forests of northern Vietnam fires are most likely to burn at high severity will assist forest fire management and recovery strategies.

Keywords: driving factors, fuel characteristics, Landsat, Relative difference Normalized Burn Ratio (RdNBR), remote sensing, southeast Asia, tropical forest fire, two-band Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI2).

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Drivers of wildfire burn severity in the montane rainforests of northern Vietnam

Abstract

References

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