Fire in the Future: Interactions with Ecosystems and Society

火是陆地生态系统生态学和多样性的一个重要特征，在进化的时间尺度上一直伴随着人类。人类利用火进行土地转换和土地管理，但也用于扑灭森林火灾，并以减少火灾蔓延的方式改变景观。这些行为导致人类与烧伤区域之间的复杂关系。这些关系因文化、生计和经济地位的不同而有很大差异。此外，火灾影响社会和经济：它们使空气质量恶化，造成财产和生命损失，并决定生态系统的功能和经济价值。先前的研究表明，气候变暖会导致越来越多的严重火灾。然而，人类和不断变化的社会经济条件可以补偿或加剧这些影响。迄今为止，人类在大多数研究中被忽视，在植被和气候模型中也没有得到很好的体现。植被-火灾模型可以解释植被、气候和人为因素的变化，但它们之间的关系仍然高度不确定。最近的一些研究已经确定，人类的作用是影响火灾预测的主要不确定因素。该项目旨在提高对人类如何影响火灾发生以及火灾发生及其对生态系统和社会的影响在21世纪将如何变化的理解。我们将通过创建一个新的人火关系数据库、探索最先进的卫星观测和使用基于过程的全球植被火灾模型来量化相关的不确定性。我们建议用跨学科的方法来解决这些问题。在DFG和FWF的资助下，来自德国和奥地利的研究人员加入了他们在火灾生态学、社会生态学、遥感、数据科学和植被建模方面的专业知识，以提高对人类、气候、植被和火灾之间从地方到全球关系的理解。该项目旨在提供：(1)基于现有文献和案例研究的元研究，建立人类使用火的数据库；(2)为全球火灾模型提供人类对火灾影响的合理模型公式。(3)量化未来火灾发生的不确定性和火灾对生态系统影响的模式预估集合。(4)量化这些火灾发生的变化和对生态系统的影响将如何影响社会。(5)对获得的知识和未来火灾使用情景的综合。这些结果对未来区域尺度上的土地管理规划有价值，并为利用地球系统模型进行未来气候预测提供更好的依据。

Fire is an important feature of the ecology and diversity of terrestrial ecosystems and has accompanied humans on evolutionary time-scale. Humans use fire for land conversion and land management but also fight forest fires and modify the landscape in ways that reduce fire spread. These actions result in complex relationships between humans and burned area. These relationships vary greatly among cultures, livelihoods, and economic status. Moreover, fires impact society and economy: they aggravate air quality, cause loss of property and lives, and determine the functions and economic values of ecosystems. Previous research shows that climate warming can cause more and more severe fires. However, humans and changing socioeconomic conditions can compensate or aggravate these effects. Humans were until now neglected in most studies and are not well represented in vegetation and climate models. Vegetation-fire models can account for changes in vegetation, climate, and human factors to project fire but the relationships are still highly uncertain. A number of recent studies have identified the role of humans as a main factor of uncertainty for fire projections. This project aims to improve the understanding of how humans influence fire occurrence and how fire occurrence and effects on ecosystems and society will change over the 21st century. We will quantify the associated uncertainty by creating a novel database on human-fire relationships, by exploring state-of-the-art satellite observations and using process-based global vegetation-fire models. We propose to address these questions with an interdisciplinary approach. Funded by DFG and FWF, researchers from Germany and Austria join their expertise in fire ecology, social ecology, remote sensing, data science, and vegetation modelling to improve the understanding of local to global relationships between humans, climate, vegetation, and fire.The project aims to provide: (1) A database on human fire use based on a meta-study of available literature and case-studies,(2) Plausible model formulations for the human influence on fires for global fire models. (3) An ensemble of model projections quantifying the uncertainty of future fire occurrence and the impact of fire on ecosystems.(4) A quantification of how these changes in fire occurrence and impacts on ecosystems will affect society.(5) A synthesis on the gained knowledge and scenarios of future fire use.These results are valuable for future planning of land management on regional scale and provide a better basis to account for fire in future climate projections using Earth system models.