Current fire regime in northwestern Patagonia grasslands.

ODDI F.; GHERMANDI L.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WILDLAND FIRE

CSIRO PUBLISHING

Lugar: Collingwood; Año: 2016 vol. 25 p. 922 - 932

1049-8001

Abstract. Fire is one of the most important disturbances in terrestrial 25 ecosystems and26 has major ecological and socioeconomic impacts. Individual fire events vary in time27space, and this pattern is captured through fire regime. In particular, few studies have28 characterized the fire regime in grasslands in spite of the importance of these29 ecosystems. The aim of this study was to describe the current fire regime of30 northwestern Patagonian grasslands in terms of seasonality, frequency and burned area.31 Our study area covered 560000 ha and we used a remote sensing approach combined32 with statistics obtained from operational databases. Fires occur during the summer, in 233 of every 3 years, with a frequency of 2.7 fires/year, and a mean size of 823 ha. Fire size34 distribution is characterized by many small fires and few large ones, and seem respond35 to a distribution from power law family. The 80% of the total area affected by fire was36 burned in few years, which were also widespread fire years in forests and woodlands of37 northwestern Patagonia. This work contributes to general knowledge about fire regime38 in grasslands and we expect that our results serve as a reference to further fire regimes39 researches.