Bousfield, C.G. orcid.org/0000-0003-3576-9779, Lindenmayer, D.B. orcid.org/0000-0002-4766-4088 and Edwards, D.P. orcid.org/0000-0001-8562-3853 (2023) Substantial and increasing global losses of timber-producing forest due to wildfires. Nature Geoscience, 16 (12). pp. 1145-1150. ISSN 1752-0894
Abstract
One-third of global forest is harvested for timber, generating ~US$1.5 trillion annually. High-severity wildfires threaten this timber production. Here we combine global maps of logging activity and stand-replacing wildfires to assess how much timber-producing forest has been lost to wildfire this century, and quantify spatio-temporal changes in annual area lost. Between 2001 and 2021, 18.5–24.7 million hectares of timber-producing forest—an area the size of Great Britain—experienced stand-replacing wildfires, with extensive burning in the western USA and Canada, Siberian Russia, Brazil and Australia. Annual burned area increased significantly throughout the twenty-first century, pointing to substantial wildfire-driven timber losses under increasingly severe climate change. To meet future timber demand, producers must adopt new management strategies and emerging technologies to combat the increasing threat of wildfires.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Climate-change impacts; Ecosystem services; Environmental impact; Fire ecology |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 11 Dec 2023 16:33 |
Last Modified: | 11 Dec 2023 16:33 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41561-023-01323-y |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:206446 |