New study maps India’s diverging fire regimes

New research from the Centre for Wildlife Studies evaluated changing fire regimes in wildlife reserves across three Indian landscapes, finding that burned area rose most steeply in the Eastern Ghats between 2002 and 2022, at 9.3% per year. The rising fires in the Eastern Ghats show that it has a more fire-prone combination of vegetation, climate, and repeated human ignition than the Western Ghats, while Central India sits in between. The study evaluated roughly 20,000 square kilometres of protected forest land across 13 reserves. Both human and climate factors explained between 21 and 77% of annual fire activity across individual reserves, with drought and community fire use both playing major, but regionally varying roles. A region- and reserve-specific deconstruction of forest fires is essential to understanding how different rainfall, temperature, and land use regimes, as well as population densities, affect fire occurrence, the researchers argue. For example, high human population density was strongly associated with more frequent fires in Kawal Wildlife Sanctuary (Telangana) and Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve (Andhra Pradesh), but in Nagarahole and Bandipur National Parks (Karnataka), similar conditions were linked with fewer fires. “Various factors could be contributing to this paradoxical trend in burned areas in India, including forest management, land-use change, changes in fire ignitions, anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability,” the study says. Using satellite-derived burned-area data from NASA’s MODIS sensor, the study found that burned area in the Western Ghats declined by 10.8% per year. It suggests that local factors, including wetter conditions and changing…This article was originally published on Mongabay