Variations in Holocene fire activity and its controls in the Ningshao Plain,eastern China

Extensive fires pose catastrophic threats to both human and natural ecosystems. Understanding the history of fire, particularly Holocene palaeofire activity in densely populated areas, is essential for predicting future fire risks and developing effective fire management policies. The complexity of fire activity is influenced by various factors, including climate and anthropogenic activities. In this study, we analysed microcharcoal from the top 35.36 m of a well-dated sediment core HMD1401 in Ningshao Plain, eastern China. We combined our findings with phytolith and diatom evidence to obtain a comprehensive understanding of variations in Holocene fire activity and its controls. The results showed that there was higher fire activity during the early and late Holocene and less fire activity during the mid-Holocene. More frequent fire occurred from c. 10 000–7000 cal. a BP and was primarily caused by abundant biomass and high seasonal flammability due to increased annual temperature and precipitation and warm but dry winter climate. Fire occurrences between c. 7000–2000 cal. a BP remained at a low level, except for the periods c. 5900–5600 cal. a BP and c. 5300 cal. a BP, which may have been caused by extreme climate events. The impact of fire caused by human activity was significantly enhanced during the last two millennia.     

Fire danger assessment with remote sensing: a case study in Northern China

Every year several million hectares of forest and grassland in China are affected by wildfires. The majority of wildfires occur in the northern part of China, where grasslands and forests are ubiquitous. A critical step toward the protection of life, property, and natural resources from wildfires is the development of a fire danger rating system. This paper presents a new method to assess fire danger that capitalizes on the abundance of environmental data available via remote sensing and applies this new method to the northern part of China. Using an analytical hierarchy process, a fire danger index was developed based on five environmental factors that are known to affect fire frequency and severity, including land surface temperature, vegetation curing, equivalent water thickness, vegetation continuity degree, and fuel weight. Data for these five factors were derived from satellite imagery, instead of point data, allowing for predictions to be made over a large geographic area. Fire danger ratings were then mapped for the region based on the fire danger index. In addition, the accuracy of the fire danger index was evaluated by statistical analyses. The fire danger index was significantly correlated with air temperature and precipitation, suggesting that changes in these two environmental variables will affect the predictions of the index.     

Relationships between typhoon types and debris flow disasters in Taiwan

Frequent debris flow disasters caused by heavy precipitation during the annual typhoon season are some of the most serious disasters in Taiwan. This study is on the debris flow disasters associated with the typhoons that hit Taiwan between 1986 and 2004. Typhoon data and records of debris flow disasters available for Nantou and Hualien counties in Taiwan were analyzed. The paths and rainfall characteristics of typhoons were found to have a great effect on the debris flows at these locations. Accordingly, the typhoons were grouped into four major types based on their paths and related disasters. The relationships between rainfall intensity and accumulation and debris flow are discussed for the four major typhoon types. The information may form the basis for providing useful indicators for disaster management.     

Three decades of landslide activity in western Nepal: new insights into trends and climate drivers

In recent decades, landslide disasters in the Himalayas, as in other mountain regions, are widely reported to have increased. While some studies have suggested a link to increasing heavy rainfall under a warmer climate, others pointed to anthropogenic influences on slope stability, and increasing exposure of people and assets located in harm’s way. A lack of sufficiently high-resolution regional landslide inventories, both spatially and temporally, has prevented any robust consensus so far. Focusing on Far-Western Nepal, we draw on remote sensing techniques to create a regional inventory of 26,350 single landslide events, of which 8778 date to the period 1992–2018. These events serve as a basis for the analyses of landslide frequency relationships and trends in relation to precipitation and temperature datasets. Results show a strong correlation between the annual number of shallow landslides and the accumulated monsoon precipitation (r = 0.74). Furthermore, warm and dry monsoons followed by especially rainy monsoons produce the highest incidence of shallow landslides (r = 0.77). However, we find strong spatial variability in the strength of these relationships, which is linked to recent demographic development in the region. This highlights the role of anthropogenic drivers, and in particular road cutting and land-use change, in amplifying the seasonal monsoon influence on slope stability. In parallel, the absence of any long-term trends in landslide activity, despite widely reported increase in landslide disasters, points strongly to increasing exposure of people and infrastructure as the main driver of landslide disasters in this region of Nepal. By contrast, no climate change signal is evident from the data.

     

Identifying wildland fire ignition factors through sensitivity analysis of a neural network

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) show a significant ability to discover patterns in data that are too obscure to go through standard statistical methods. Data of natural phenomena usually exhibit significantly unpredictable non-linearity, but the robust behavior of a neural network makes it perfectly adaptable to environmental models such as a wildland fire danger rating system. These systems have been adopted by many developed countries that have invested in wildland fire prevention, and thus civil protection agencies are able to identify areas with high probabilities of fire ignition and resort to necessary actions. Since one of the drawbacks of ANNs is the interpretation of the final model in terms of the importance of variables, this article presents the results of sensitivity analysis performed in a back-propagation neural network (BPN) to distinguish the influence of each variable in a fire ignition risk scheme developed for Lesvos Island in Greece. Four different methods were utilized to evaluate the three fire danger indices developed within the above scheme; three of the methods are based on network’s weights after the training procedure (i.e., the percentage of influence—PI, the weight product—WP, and the partial derivatives—PD methods), and one is based on the logistic regression (LR) model between BPN inputs and observed outputs. Results showed that the occurrence of rainfall, the 10-h fuel moisture content, and the month of the year parameter are the most significant variables of the Fire Weather, Fire Hazard, and Fire Risk Indices, respectively. Relative humidity, elevation, and day of the week have a small contribution to fire ignitions in the study area. The PD method showed the best performance in ranking variables’ importance, while performance of the rest of the methods was influenced by the number of input parameters and the magnitude of their importance. The results can be used by local forest managers and other decision makers dealing with wildland fires to take the appropriate preventive measures by emphasizing on the important factors of fire occurrence.     

Modeling forest fire risk in the northeast of Iran using remote sensing and GIS techniques

Fire in forested areas can be regarded as an environmental disaster which is triggered by either natural forces or anthropogenic activities. Fires are one of the major hazards in forested and grassland areas in the north of Iran. Control of fire is difficult, but it is feasible to map fire risk by geospatial technologies and thereby minimize the frequency of fire occurrences and damages caused by fire. The fire risk models provide a suitable concept to understand characterization of fire risk. Some models are map based, and they combine effectively different forest fire–causing variables with remote sensing data in a GIS environment for identifying and mapping forest fire risk. In this study, Structural Fire Index, Fire Risk Index, and a new index called Hybrid Fire Index were used to delineate fire risk in northeastern Iran that is subjected to frequent forest fire. Vegetation moisture, slope, aspect, elevation, distance from roads, and vicinity to settlements were used as the factors influencing accidental fire starts. These indices were set up by assigning subjective weight values to the classes of the layers based on their sensitivity ratio to fire. Hot spots data derived from MODIS satellite sensor were used to validate the indices. Assessment of the indices with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves shows that 76.7 % accuracy of the HFI outperformed the other two indices. According to the Hybrid Fire Index, 57.5 % of the study area is located under high-risk zone, 33 % in medium-risk zone, and the remaining 9.5 % area is located in low-risk zone.     

River catchment rainfall series analysis using additive Holt–Winters method

Climate change is receiving more attention from researchers as the frequency of occurrence of severe natural disasters is getting higher. Tropical countries like Malaysia have no distinct four seasons; rainfall has become the popular parameter to assess climate change. Conventional ways that determine rainfall trends can only provide a general result in single direction for the whole study period. In this study, rainfall series were modelled using additive Holt–Winters method to examine the rainfall pattern in Langat River Basin, Malaysia. Nine homogeneous series of more than 25 years data and less than 10% missing data were selected. Goodness of fit of the forecasted models was measured. It was found that seasonal rainfall model forecasts are generally better than the monthly rainfall model forecasts. Three stations in the western region exhibited increasing trend. Rainfall in southern region showed fluctuation. Increasing trends were discovered at stations in the south-eastern region except the seasonal analysis at station 45253. Decreasing trend was found at station 2818110 in the east, while increasing trend was shown at station 44320 that represents the north-eastern region. The accuracies of both rainfall model forecasts were tested using the recorded data of years 2010–2012. Most of the forecasts are acceptable.     

降雨因子对湖北省山地灾害影响的分析

根据湖北省1950～2003年726个山洪地质灾害样本,分析了其时空分布特征。滑动t-检验显示,逐年灾害数在1974年、1988年前后出现两次显著性突变增多（其中山洪、滑坡增多最明显）,逐年降雨量也相应有两次增加,二者相关系数可达0.3。表明我省年降雨量趋势性增加是灾害增多的主要诱因。进一步分析表明,暴雨以上强降雨是山洪、滑坡、泥石流、塌陷的主要诱因,连阴雨是崩塌的主要诱因,同时对滑坡、泥石流、塌陷有重要影响,对山洪灾害影响则较小。     

Lightning casualties and damages in China from 1997 to 2009

Lightning-related fatalities, injuries and property damages reported in China from 1997 to 2009 are summarized by using the National Lightning Hazards Database. Therefore, characteristics of the incidents including 5,033 deaths, 4,670 injuries and 61,614 damage reports are analyzed. For the spatial distribution of lightning disasters in China, the eastern costal and southern areas have more frequent lightning disasters than the western areas. Lightning disasters mainly occur in summer months from July to September, while fewer damages occur in winter months from October to March, which correlate significantly with the temporal variability of lightning frequency in China. Lightning-related casualties and damages in China have increased for the period of 1997 to 2007 and then began to decrease since 2008. The national fatalities and injuries per million people per year are 0.31 and 0.28, respectively. Rural people account for 51 and 29% of all lightning fatalities and injuries, which makes residents in agricultural and rural area the major lightning victims. Characteristics of lightning disasters and correlative factors are also studied, including hazard-affected industries and locations. The results show that civil industry has the worst property loss and farmland is the largest category in lightning-caused casualty locations.     

Climatic controls of Holocene fire patterns in southern South America

Holocene fire-climate-vegetation linkages are mostly understood at individual sites by comparing charcoal and pollen records with other paleoenvironmental proxy and model simulations. This scale of reconstruction often obscures detection of large-scale patterns in past fire activity that are related to changes in regional climate and vegetation. A network of 31 charcoal records from southern South America was examined to assess fire history along a transect from subtropic to subantarctic biomes. The charcoal data indicate that fire activity was greater than present at ca. 12,000 cal yr BP and increased further and was widespread at 9500 cal yr BP. Fire activity decreased and became more spatially variable by 6000 cal yr BP, and this trend continued to present. Atmospheric circulation anomalies during recent high-fire years show a southward shift in westerlies, and paleoclimate model simulations and data syntheses suggest that such conditions may have prevailed for millennia in the early Holocene when the pole-to-equator temperature gradients were weaker and annual temperatures were higher than present, in response to orbital-time-scale insolation changes.     

Magnification of Flood Disasters and its Relation to Regional Precipitation and Local Human Activities since the 1980s in Xinjiang,Northwestern China

Analyses of flood disasters were conducted using 1950–2001 data on the flood-damaged areas of cropland, the annual number of flood disasters and the direct economic losses in Xinjiang. There is an increasing trend in flood disasters in Xinjiang during the second half of the 20th century, especially since the mid-1980s. Results of a non-parametric Mann–Kendall test on the cropland-flooded index time series revealed an abrupt change in the mid-1980s. The reasons are discussed with respect to changes in annual precipitation and regional human activities, by correlating cropland-flooded area to annual precipitation and three socio-economic parameters (population, cropland area and GDP). The correlation coefficients between the flood-damaged area and the annual precipitation during the periods 1961–1998 and 1987–1998 were substantially higher than during the period of 1961–1986. The correlation coefficients between the flood-damaged area and the three human activity parameters, however, were relatively high for the whole period of 1961–1998, but generally not significant for the 1961–1986 and 1987–1998 periods, separately. These suggest that the occurrence of flood disasters could be mainly induced by local human activities before the mid-1980s, and thereafter mainly by abnormal precipitation in Xinjiang. Meteorological and hydrological records showed that the number of heavy rainfall events and the frequency of rainstorm flood disasters increased since the 1980s. In addition, siltation of reservoirs and loss of flood control structures are partly responsible for the increase of flood-damaged area. These results suggest that the increasing trend in flood disasters in Xinjiang since the middle 1980s could be attributed, at least in part, to an increasing trend in annual precipitation.     

Wildfire evacuations in Canada 1980–2007

Evacuations represent an integral aspect of protecting public safety in locations where intense, fast-spreading forest fires co-occur with human populations. Most Canadian fire management agencies have as their primary objective the protection of people and property, and all fire management agencies in Canada recommend evacuations when public safety is in question. This study provides the first national assessment of wildfire-related evacuations in Canada and documents the loss of homes that coincided with evacuation events. The most striking finding is that despite the intensity and abundance of wildfire in Canada, wildfires have displaced a relatively small number of people. Between 1980 and 2007, the median number of evacuees and home losses per year in Canada were 3,590 and 2, respectively. Evacuees’ homes survived in 99.3% of cases. Patterns of evacuations and home losses reflected the distributions of forests, wildfire, and people across the Canadian landscape. Most evacuations occurred in boreal areas, which have relatively low population densities but among the highest percent annual area burned in Canada. Evacuations were less common in southern parts of the country, where most Canadians reside, but individual wildfires in these areas had significant impacts. Interactions between wildfire and people in Canada exhibited a unique regional pattern, and within the most densely populated regions of the country they can be considered ‘low-probability, high-consequence’ events. This Canadian context is fundamentally different from places such as California, where concentrations of fires and people overlap across large areas and therefore calls for a fundamentally different fire management response.     

2004—2018年北京市突发地质灾害时空分布特点和监测预警状况

本文对北京市规划和自然资源委员会发布的《北京市环境公报》（2004—2018年）和北京市水务局发布的《北京市水资源公报》（2004—2018年）进行了全面梳理,详细分析了近15年来北京市突发地质灾害的类别构成和时空分布规律。北京市突发地质灾害有崩塌、滑坡、泥石流和地面塌陷4种类型,其中崩塌是北京市发生数量最多的地质灾害。北京市突发地质灾害规模较小,分布广泛。大部分灾害发生在汛期,表明北京市突发地质灾害与降雨密切相关。极端强降雨发生后,不同类型灾害集中暴发。近年来,北京市突发地质灾害专业监测预警工作积极开展,并取得一定的成绩,但是相关的科研、监测预警技术等地灾防治工作仍需提升。本文的相关结论来源于真实数据的统计分析,可为北京市突发地质灾害监测预警工作提供客观数据支撑。     

基于降雨响应的黄土丘陵区滑坡危险性预测研究——以宝鸡市麟游县为例

极端降雨易造成群发滑坡灾害,难以作为单体预测.为预测评估黄土丘陵区不同降雨强度诱发滑坡灾害危险性,论文在区域滑坡灾害特征研究的基础上,分析降雨强度特征及滑坡分布特征.以岭南滑坡为代表分析降雨诱发黄土-丘陵区滑坡的形成机制,介绍了无限斜坡模型原理、参数选取,利用GIS空间建模与分析功能,定量完成了无降雨、25 mm、50...     

我国雷电灾害及相关因素分析

为了更好地揭示雷电灾害的时空分布规律和成因机制过程,在1997—2006年全国雷电灾害数据库和星载闪电探测数据的基础上,分析研究了雷电灾害及相关因素的特征,包括雷电灾情、孕灾环境、致灾因子、承灾体及其相互作用,得到以下一些结果:①雷灾事故数、雷灾人员伤亡数与我国不同地区的致灾因子(闪电活动)、承灾体(人口和经济发展现况)成正相关;雷电灾情不同类型与承灾体类型(城乡人口比例、经济发展现况)有密切关系;②我国雷电灾情和闪电活动的时间特征是紧密相关的,同时雷电灾情的时间特征与人们的作息时间相关;③不同的孕灾环境下造成雷电伤害人员的方式特征不同,雷击死亡人数在农田最多,而受伤人数在建构筑物内最多;④80%的雷灾伤亡人员事故只涉及1~2人的生命安全,其中1人遭受雷击的占总事件的61%;⑤重大雷灾伤亡事件直接与承灾体的脆弱性有关。     

Coexisting with wildfire? Achievements and challenges for a radical social-ecological transformation in Catalonia (Spain)

The challenge of sustainability is not about producing more or better managerial knowledge. It is in fact a transformation of the systems and structures that perpetuate environmental problems that is emerging as the key sustainability goal. In this paper we show the relevance of this argument, by using wildfires as symptoms of the challenges posed by global change to western societies, where wildfires are becoming increasingly problematic. Climate change, land abandonment, exurban expansion and fire suppression schemes are some of the main reasons behind this. Tackling the increasing intensity and complexity of wildfires is consequently emerging as an important research and policy topic. A central question in the literature is how to achieve a more sustainable coexistence with wildfire. Fuel reduction treatments, fire restoration, the reform of current suppression policies and adaptive institutional arrangements have all been debated. However, the social-ecological transformations needed to effectively implement these management options are not sufficiently understood. This paper looks at the efforts of the Catalan wildfire management system to cope with wildfire risk over the last decades. In particular, the emergence of GRAF, a group of wildfire fighting specialists in the Fire Department, is described. Emphasizing the need to understand wildfires as an inherent part of Mediterranean ecosystems, the expansion of GRAF highlights how learning to coexist with wildfire in Catalonia has triggered a set of transformative processes in institutional arrangements and power relationships of the wildfire management system. Our data also illustrate how coexisting with wildfire entails a dramatic social-ecological transformation in terms of land-uses, settlement patterns, energy supply systems and social values about wildfires. Moreover, we warn that in the absence of such systemic changes, management improvements might paradoxically reinforce risk. We conclude that wildfire researchers and practitioners should link the proposed management options to a deeper debate on how to produce alternative, less flammable landscapes, as agents of a broader social-ecological transformation to sustainability.     

Landslides on the Loess Plateau of China: a latest statistics together with a close look

China has a serious wildfire problem with a large number of fires in the south of the country especially during the winter (DJF) and spring (MAM) seasons. This study focused on identifying the causes of variability in inter-annual fire seasons. The relationship between fires and climatic parameters (precipitation, evapotranspiration and potential evapotranspiration) was evaluated on annual and seasonal (winter, spring) time scales. Certain other parameters (moisture balance, surface moisture balance, coefficient of variability of daily precipitation and ratio between evapotranspiration and potential evapotranspiration) were also calculated and related to fire variability for both time scales. Inter-annual time scale was found not to be strong enough to explain fire activity in the region; however, inter-seasonal fire variability showed significant correlation with potential evapotranspiration and with the ratio between evapotranspiration and potential evapotranspiration. The relationship and relative variability between evapotranspiration and the potential evapotranspiration were found to have important effect on inter-seasonal fire variability as compared to the other parameters studied, and link fire activity in the region to large-scale climatic systems.     

Fire and vegetation shifts in the Americas at the vanguard of Paleoindian migration

Across North and South America, the final millennia of the Pleistocene saw dramatic changes in climate, vegetation, fauna, fire regime, and other local and regional paleo-environmental characteristics. Rapid climate shifts following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) exerted a first-order influence, but abrupt post-glacial shifts in vegetation composition, vegetation structure, and fire regime also coincided with human arrival and transformative faunal extinctions in the Americas. We propose a model of post-glacial vegetation change in response to climatic drivers, punctuated by local fire regime shifts in response to megaherbivore-driven fuel changes and anthropogenic ignitions. The abrupt appearance of humans, disappearance of megaherbivores, and resulting changes in New World fire systems were transformative events that should not be dismissed in favor of climate-only interpretations of post-glacial paleo-environmental shifts in the Americas. Fire is a mechanism by which small human populations can have broad impacts, and growing evidence suggests that early anthropogenic influences on regional, even global, paleo-environments should be tested alongside other potential causal mechanisms.     

Wildfire impacts on the processes that generate debris flows in burned watersheds

Every year, and in many countries worldwide, wildfires cause significant damage and economic losses due to both the direct effects of the fires and the subsequent accelerated runoff, erosion, and debris flow. Wildfires can have profound effects on the hydrologic response of watersheds by changing the infiltration characteristics and erodibility of the soil, which leads to decreased rainfall infiltration, significantly increased overland flow and runoff in channels, and movement of soil. Debris-flow activity is among the most destructive consequences of these changes, often causing extensive damage to human infrastructure. Data from the Mediterranean area and Western United States of America help identify the primary processes that result in debris flows in recently burned areas. Two primary processes for the initiation of fire-related debris flows have been so far identified: (1) runoff-dominated erosion by surface overland flow; and (2) infiltration-triggered failure and mobilization of a discrete landslide mass. The first process is frequently documented immediately post-fire and leads to the generation of debris flows through progressive bulking of storm runoff with sediment eroded from the hillslopes and channels. As sediment is incorporated into water, runoff can convert to debris flow. The conversion to debris flow may be observed at a position within a drainage network that appears to be controlled by threshold values of upslope contributing area and its gradient. At these locations, sufficient eroded material has been incorporated, relative to the volume of contributing surface runoff, to generate debris flows. Debris flows have also been generated from burned basins in response to increased runoff by water cascading over a steep, bedrock cliff, and incorporating material from readily erodible colluvium or channel bed. Post-fire debris flows have also been generated by infiltration-triggered landslide failures which then mobilize into debris flows. However, only 12% of documented cases exhibited this process. When they do occur, the landslide failures range in thickness from a few tens of centimeters to more than 6 m, and generally involve the soil and colluvium-mantled hillslopes. Surficial landslide failures in burned areas most frequently occur in response to prolonged periods of storm rainfall, or prolonged rainfall in combination with rapid snowmelt or rain-on-snow events.     

陇东黄土高原北部全新世野火历史的木炭屑记录

全新世黄土-古土壤剖面保存的木炭屑记录了野火和自然景观演变的过程,本研究通过野外考察采样和磁化率、TOC、木炭屑的实验分析探索陇东黄土高原北部地区全新世野火的历史。研究结果表明:11500aB.P.之前末次冰期,气候干旱,在半荒漠草原植被条件下,自然野火频繁发生;全新世早期（11500～8500aB.P.）野火发生频率大大降低;8500～3100aB.P.为全新世气候适宜期,气候相对比较湿润,生物风化成壤作用强烈,呈现森林草原景观,野火发生几率明显下降,但在古土壤形成早期,木炭屑峰值反映有野火频繁发生,这可能是新石器时代早期老官台文化（8000～7000aB.P.）时期人类用火及其放火烧荒开垦农田等活动的结果;全新世晚期气候向干旱化发展,具有游牧性质的寺洼文化（3250～2650aB.P.）出现在陇东北部黄土高原地区,有一定野火活动。1500aB.P.以后,木炭屑浓度大幅度减少,反映野火很少发生,可能由于本地区半农半牧土地利用方式已经确立,人工-自然复合生态景观形成。