Pre-Fire Vegetation Conditions and Topography Shape Burn Mosaics of Siberian Tundra Fire Scars

Abstract

The fire season of 2020 in Siberia set a precedent for extreme wildfires in the Arctic tundra. Recent estimates indicated that the 2020 fires contributed 66% of the region's burned area over the last two decades. These fires burned in the carbon-rich permafrost landscape, releasing vast amounts of carbon, and changing land surface processes by burning vegetation and organic soils. However, little is known about the mosaics of burned and unburned patches formed by tundra fires and the underlying processes that generate them. In this study, we investigated six fire scars in the northeastern Siberian tundra using high-resolution PlanetScope imagery (3 m) to map burned fraction within the scars. We then used Bayesian mixed models to identify which biotic and abiotic predictors influenced the burned fraction. We observed high spatial variation in burned fraction across all tundra landforms common to the region. Current medium-resolution fire products could not capture this heterogeneity, thereby underestimating the burned area of fire scars by a factor of 1.2–4.7. The heterogeneity of the burn mosaic indicates a mix of burned and unburned patches, with median unburned patch sizes ranging between 189 and 288 m² per fire scar. Pre-fire land surface temperature, vegetation heterogeneity and topography predicted burned fraction in our analysis, matching factors previously shown to influence large-scale fire occurrence in the Arctic. Future studies need to consider the fine-scale heterogeneity within tundra landscapes to improve our understanding and predictions of fire spread, carbon emissions, post-fire recovery and ecosystem functioning.