Bousfield, C.G. orcid.org/0000-0003-3576-9779, Morton, O. orcid.org/0000-0001-5483-4498, Lindenmayer, D.B. orcid.org/0000-0002-4766-4088 et al. (3 more authors) (2025) Global risk of wildfire across timber production systems. Nature Communications, 16 (1). 4204. ISSN 2041-1723
Abstract
Timber is worth $1.5 trillion US Dollars annually with demand rising, but wildfires increasingly threaten production. Plantations occupy 3% of forests globally and produce 33% of the world’s timber, but a critical question is whether they are more vulnerable to stand-replacing wildfires than natural production forests. We combine forest management and wildfire data to estimate that 15.7 (14.7–16.7) million hectares of natural production forests and 1.4 (1.26–1.64) million hectares of plantations suffered stand-replacing wildfires between 2015 and 2022. Using statistical matching for 17 countries representing 50% of global production and 75% of burned timber-producing forest, we find plantations in temperate regions were twice as likely to suffer stand-replacing wildfires than natural production forests, including in vital timber-producing nations like China and Russia. Plantations in tropical regions showed no clear effect, with national differences ranging from 75% lower to 58% higher risk of burning. Given increasing global reliance on plantation timber, preventing wildfires through landscape-level planning, fire management, and increased plantation diversity is critical for global wood security.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. 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 licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence 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 licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Fire ecology; Forestry |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 21 May 2025 10:44 |
Last Modified: | 21 May 2025 10:44 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41467-025-59272-6 |
Related URLs: | |
Sustainable Development Goals: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:226932 |