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Regional modeling of large wildfires under current and potential future climates in Colorado and Wyoming, USA

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Abstract

Regional analysis of large wildfire potential given climate change scenarios is crucial to understanding areas most at risk in the future, yet wildfire models are not often developed and tested at this spatial scale. We fit three historical climate suitability models for large wildfires (i.e. ≥ 400 ha) in Colorado and Wyoming using topography and decadal climate averages corresponding to wildfire occurrence at the same temporal scale. The historical models classified points of known large wildfire occurrence with high accuracies. Using a novel approach in wildfire modeling, we applied the historical models to independent climate and wildfire datasets, and the resulting sensitivities were 0.75, 0.81, and 0.83 for Maxent, Generalized Linear, and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, respectively. We projected the historic models into future climate space using data from 15 global circulation models and two representative concentration pathway scenarios. Maps from these geospatial analyses can be used to evaluate the changing spatial distribution of climate suitability of large wildfires in these states. April relative humidity was the most important covariate in all models, providing insight to the climate space of large wildfires in this region. These methods incorporate monthly and seasonal climate averages at a spatial resolution relevant to land management (i.e. 1 km2) and provide a tool that can be modified for other regions of North America, or adapted for other parts of the world.

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Acknowledgments

We thank William H. Romme for his insight and edits on an early draft of this manuscript. Special thanks to the USGS Invasive Species Program for support. Amanda West acknowledges support from the National Needs Fellowship program of National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture (Award No.- 2010-03280). Finally, the authors would like to thank anonymous journal reviewers. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523, USA

    Amanda M. West & Sunil Kumar

  2. Department of Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management, Colorado State University, 2150 Centre Ave Bldg. C, Fort Collins, CO, 80526, USA

    Sunil Kumar

  3. Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Colorado State University, 2150 Centre Ave Bldg. C, Fort Collins, CO, 80526, USA

    Sunil Kumar

  4. U.S. Geological Survey, Fort Collins Science Center, 2150 Centre Ave Bldg. C, Fort Collins, CO, 80526, USA

    Catherine S. Jarnevich

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  1. Amanda M. West
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Correspondence to Amanda M. West.

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West, A.M., Kumar, S. & Jarnevich, C.S. Regional modeling of large wildfires under current and potential future climates in Colorado and Wyoming, USA. Climatic Change 134, 565–577 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1553-5

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