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Post-Soviet Land-Use Change Affected Fire Regimes on the Eurasian Steppes

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Abstract

Fire is an important disturbance in grassland ecosystems. Anthropogenic factors, especially land use, have drastically altered fire regimes in many regions, but how changing land-use intensity affects fire patterns remains weakly understood. Here, we reconstruct changes in fire regimes between 1989 and 2016 for the understudied Eurasian steppes, where major land-use changes happened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. We mapped burned areas in a 540,000 km2 study region in northern Kazakhstan for 3-year periods centered on 1990, 2000, and 2015, based on all available Landsat imagery. We then used these maps to assess changes in the extent, number, and size of fires over time, and to explore links between changes in fire regimes and agriculture. We found a sevenfold increase in total burned area and an eightfold increase in fire numbers between 1990 and 2000. After 2000, burned area and fire numbers declined slightly, while fire size remained stable. Most of the observed increase in fires in the 1990s occurred on cropland, most likely due to the agricultural burning. The abandonment of cropland and pastures was also associated with intensified fire regimes, likely due to increased aboveground biomass and thus higher fuel loads. Overall, our results suggest that intensifying fire regimes on the Eurasian steppe are clearly linked to post-Soviet changes in agriculture. Given that fires on Eurasia’s steppes have wide-ranging consequences, affecting regions as far away as the Arctic, better regulation of agricultural practices, better fire monitoring, and more proactive fire management are needed.

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Acknowledgements

We thank David Frantz and Andreas Rabe for help with image processing and classification and Alexander V. Prishchepov for the Soviet topography maps and fruitful discussion on post-Soviet land-use change. We are grateful for the financial support by the Volkswagen Foundation through the project BALTRAK (#A112025). We thank Geoff Henebry and an anonymous reviewer for their very useful and constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geography Department, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Andrey Dara, Matthias Baumann, Patrick Hostert, Daniel Müller & Tobias Kuemmerle

  2. Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Theodor-Lieser-Str. 2, 06120, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Andrey Dara & Daniel Müller

  3. Institute of Landscape Ecology, University of Münster, Heisenbergstr. 2, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Norbert Hölzel, Johannes Kamp & Benjamin Ullrich

  4. Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Patrick Hostert, Daniel Müller & Tobias Kuemmerle

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Correspondence to Andrey Dara.

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AD and TK conceived the ideas for the study; AD, JK, NH, and BU collected the data; AD analyzed the data; and AD led the writing with contribution from all authors.

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Dara, A., Baumann, M., Hölzel, N. et al. Post-Soviet Land-Use Change Affected Fire Regimes on the Eurasian Steppes. Ecosystems 23, 943–956 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-019-00447-w

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