pyrogeography

AGU session to explore drivers of fire

July 11, 2017 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group News

I’m excited to be hosting an American Geophysical Union (AGU) session in December 2017 and excited about only having to fly to New Orleans instead of San Francisco. This is the first time in many many years that AGU has not been in San Fran. My session co-conveners are Sam Rabin (Germany), Fang Li (Beijing), and Guido van der Werf (Netherlands). Alex Schaefer (my PhD student) will certainly be out there, and I hope our session hosts a diverse set of oral and poster presentations that allow us all to collectively explore the many different scales of how to study fire patterns on our planet, and what it all means in the context of the on-going human-driven climate change. The session viewer link for AGU is at https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm17/preliminaryview.cgi/Session26024 and here are the details:

Session Title: Quantifying drivers of global and regional fire patterns using data and models

Session ID#: 26024

Session Description: Fire is a critical component of Earth system dynamics and the carbon cycle. However, since climate and human driving factors vary considerably over time and space, capturing observed patterns using simulations remains a major challenge. These challenges also result in important uncertainties in predicting future fire activity, understanding past fire activity, and quantifying the role of fire in the Earth system. Paleorecords offer a diverse source of global/regional fire data on decadal to millennial timescales. The present day has extensive satellite records and increasingly detailed observations. Fire model are informed by present day records, but offer a way to test fundamental hypotheses well beyond the present. This session seeks presentations that aim to quantify the role of humans and climate in driving patterns of fire at multiple spatiotemporal scales. The goal of our session is to foster interdisciplinary discussions of how data can inform models, and models can inform data.

Primary Convener: Brian Indrek Magi, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, United States
Conveners: Sam S Rabin, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, Fang Li, Inst. of Atmospheric Physics, Beijing, China and Guido van der Werf, Organization Not Listed, Washington, DC, United States

Cross-Listed: A – Atmospheric Sciences, GC – Global Environmental Change, NH – Natural Hazards

Index Terms: 0414 Biogeochemical cycles, processes, and modeling [BIOGEOSCIENCES], 0434 Data sets [BIOGEOSCIENCES], 0466 Modeling [BIOGEOSCIENCES], 1630 Impacts of global change [GLOBAL CHANGE]

Fires in California during Summer 2017

Tags: AGUclimate-fire interactionsfirehuman-fire interactionspyrogeography

Pyrogeography at the AAG Conference

April 17, 2015 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group NewsResearch News

Another major conference is on the horizon – the Association of American Geographers (AAG) meeting which is in Chicago this year. Check #AAG15. Conferences are absolutely critical for multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary research, and I think for just about all research. Science, like many (most?) other professional enterprises, requires discussion. My first AAG was last year in Tampa, and that was a great experience. The atmosphere at the Tampa conference was informal, yet had the intensity associated with presenting a range of results from preliminary to pretty polished to peer-reviewed and published results. I also liked the thematic message from AAG 2014: Research about climate change past, present, and future will benefit from geographical thinking.

Annual firecounts from the NASA MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite. Nearly 2 million fires happen every year!

Annual firecounts from the NASA MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite. Nearly 2 million fires happen every year!

Geographical thinking, to me, implies a consideration of human-environmental interactions across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Atmospheric sciences, which is my “home” discipline, tends to focus on atmospheric interactions across time and space scales. Fire research has to consider human-climate-fire interactions, and while I tend toward the climate-fire side since it’s closer to my home discipline, I keep hoping to see some new patterns that capture some regularity in human behavior in the world of large-scale global fire activity. Fire is important in understanding past and future carbon cycle dynamics, but also seems to be symbolic of the human impact on our planet. Are humans driving fire? Are they agents that change fire regimes and then in turn respond to the changing regime? Or is climate exerting a longer time scale control on fire activity that is above and beyond human control? Many interesting questions emerge from questions about fire drivers at seemingly every spatiotemporal scale, and throughout disciplines that could be aligned with geography.

AAG 2015 will include a full day talks about fire on our planet, or pyrogeography. I think pyrogeography is a great term that encapsulates my research. So Earth Day 2015 for me will be at the AAG Pyrogeography Session. I worked with several different types of researchers studying pyrogeography to bring data, modeling, and cultural expertise together for what is now 25 talks on Wednesday April 22. 8am to 7pm.

Pyrogeography Sessions at AAG
8:00 AM – 9:40 AM 2101 Pyrogeography I: Fire Histories 1
10:00 AM – 11:40 AM 2201 Pyrogeography II: Fire Histories 2
11:40 AM – 1:20 PM Lunch
1:20 PM – 3:00 PM 2401 Pyrogeography III: Fire Drivers
3:20 PM – 5:00 PM 2501 Pyrogeography IV: Fire Case Studies
5:20 PM – 7:00 PM 2601 Pyrogeography V: West African Fires

My talk will focus on how global fire modeling – a framework to simulate the biogeophysical processes driving fire activity – contributes to the discussion, and how it can advance the discussion so that we can better test hypotheses about human-climate-fire interactions. I’ve been closely reviewing some recent (peer-reviewed, published) work by scientists working on fire modeling to prepare for my talk. One of my current favorite visualizations of how human activities introduce big challenges in fire modeling is from a paper by Pfeiffer, Spessa, and Kaplan that shows that the biggest discrepancies between complex fire modeling and satellite data (like above) are in parts of the world most impacted by humans.

Lighter colors indicate that regions with larger discrepancies from observations are in areas impacted most by humans. Are humans agents in fire patterns? Are they responsive?

Lighter colors indicate that regions with larger discrepancies from observations are in areas impacted most by humans.

My colleague, Sam Rabin, will present work we’ve been finalizing over the last 3 months to better understand how satellite data can be used to unpack fire signals into component parts such as cropland and pasture fires. Our research has a lot of interesting implications about how widespread/important pasture fires might be. Not coincidentally, pasture and cropland maps like the one below from our 2012 paper, show that human impact and cultivated land are similar. There is 148 million square kilometers of land on Earth, 100 million square kilometers is vegetated, and 50 million square kilometers is cultivated! HALF of all arable land is cultivated! By inference, we need to know more about pasture and cropland fire practices.
Distribution of agriculture, cropland, and pasture. Half of all arable land is currently cultivated.

Distribution of agriculture, cropland, and pasture.

Tags: AAGclimate-fire interactionsfireglobal environmental changehuman-fire interactionsinterdisciplinary researchpyrogeography

Funded graduate research assistant for fire modeling project

November 07, 2014 by Brian Magi
Categories: Group NewsResearch News

This is an advertisement I am circulating around to listserves and colleagues to recruit a graduate student (Masters or PhD) into my recently-funded NSF research project. The grant title is “Collaborative Research: Testing Hypotheses About Fire Using Data Syntheses and Fire Modeling” and I am working with researchers at Yale University (Dr Jenn Marlon) and University of Oregon (Dr Bart Bartein) to better understand questions related to the intersection of global fire modeling and paleofire data. The NSF public project summary is here. The recruiting ad is below. Please consider applying! Email if you have questions, or I’d be happy to meet with you at SEDAAG (Athens, GA), AMS (Phoenix, AZ), or AAG (Chicago, IL). Thanks!

Dr. Brian Magi is seeking a graduate student to join the Multidisciplinary Earth System and Atmospheric Sciences (MESAS) research group in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (mesas.uncc.edu). The student will develop research within the context of an NSF funded project focused on studying how global fire modeling can use past and present data to investigate the interactions between fire, climate, and land-use change over a range of time scales. Students will join a multi-institution research team and will engage with an international effort to improve our ability to understand and model fire in the Earth system.

Applicants may apply as a Masters student, or, if they hold an MS degree, as a PhD student. Regardless, applicants should have at least one degree in atmospheric sciences, geography, earth system science, or related field in the physical sciences. The ideal candidate will have a strong quantitative background and computer programming experience, as well as interest in interdisciplinary topics related to climate-human dimensions of global fire activity.

The funded position is available for 2 years, includes tuition, and starts in August 2015. To apply, please email Dr. Brian Magi (brian dot magi at uncc dot edu) a cover letter describing your research interests, goals, and relevant experience, a CV, unofficial college transcripts, GRE scores, and contact information for three references. Questions should be sent to the same email address.

Review of applications will begin immediately and the position will remain open until a suitable candidate is found. After the selection, the successful candidate will apply to be admitted to appropriate UNC Charlotte graduate program; detailed information about the application procedure to the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences is available online (geoearth.uncc.edu).

Tags: firehuman-fire interactionsProspective Studentspyrogeographystudent research

Call for Abstracts for Pyrogeography session at AAG 2015

October 22, 2014 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System ObserverResearch News

This is a post that I will link via twitter. If you are interested in presenting your Pyrogeography research at the Association of American Geographers 2015 annual meeting in Chicago in late April 2015, please submit an Abstract and send your AAG PIN to me or another session organizer. AAG Abstract deadline is November 5.

Our other Pyrogeography session co-organizers include Paul Laris (CSU Long Beach), Jenn Marlon (Yale Univ), Michael Coughlan (Univ of Georgia Athens), and Leif Brottem (Grinnell College).

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Call for Abstracts AAG 2015

Title: Pyrogeography

Description: Pyrogeography seeks to understand the spatio-temporal patterns of fire as a function of the complex interplay of human and environmental factors. Over the past century, there have been enormous changes in human perceptions and uses of fire around the world. Moreover, climate and fuel conditions have been rapidly changing in recent decades, further altering interactions between fire and its various controls. Fire researchers are increasingly seeking ways to integrate multiple perspectives and sources of data and information to better understand the changing dimensions of fire regimes, whether expressed through shifts in extent of area burned, fire frequency, type, severity, or seasonality. All methodological approaches are welcome and we especially welcome mixed-method research approaches. Research approaches may span local to global scales, and include diverse approaches from geography and anthropology, based on paleoecological, dendrochronological, archaeological, historical, satellite, mixed-methods, and other modern approaches, as well as global and regional fire modeling research, and fusions of these methods.

Session co-organizers include: Paul Laris [Paul.Laris at csulb.edu], Brian Magi [brian.magi at uncc.edu], Jennifer Marlon [jennmarlon at gmail.com], Michael Coughlan [coughlan at uga.edu], and Leif Brottem [brotteml at grinnell.edu]. Contact any of the co-organizers if you are interested in participating or have questions.

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Fires in January 2014

Fires in January 2014 from NASA Rapid Response

Fires in September

Fires in September 2014 from NASA Rapid Response

Fire images are from NASA Rapid Response.

Tags: firehuman-fire interactionsinterdisciplinary researchpyrogeography