Impacts of Climate and Land Use Change on Wildland Fire Frequency and the Amur Tiger

Principal Investigator:

Tatiana Loboda

Forests of the Russian Far East, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage site and home to the highly endangered Amur tiger, are severely threatened by wildland fires. The frequency of catastrophic fire events in boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere is predicted to rise due to the global warming trends. The current and future well-being of this unique biome and the Amur tiger will largely depend on fire management strategies aimed at minimizing the effects of wildland fires on the area resources. The large size and mountainous terrain of the study area and government control of data sources make remote sensing the only viable source of data for spatially explicit modeling. This research aims at developing a regional remotely sensed data driven model for analyzing current state and future scenarios of Fire Threat to the Amur tiger. Different components of Fire Threat will be estimated through moderate and coarse resolution satellite data. This study will explore causes and distribution of fire in this ecosystem, conditions leading to significant fire events, impacts of these fires on the Amur tiger habitat, and its recovery potential. The final goal of this research is to estimate the likelihood of increased fire occurrence with predicted climate and land use change on the region. Possibility of mitigating against rising fire threat by implementing changes in land use practices will be investigated.