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Climate, Livestock, and Vegetation: What Drives Fire Increase in the Arid Ecosystems of Southern Russia?

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Abstract

Fire is an important natural disturbance process in arid grasslands but current fire regimes are largely the result of both human and natural processes and their interactions. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 spurred substantial socioeconomic changes and was ultimately followed by a rapid increase in burned area in southern Russia. What is unclear is whether this increase in burned area was caused by decreasing livestock numbers, vegetation changes, climate change, or interactions of these factors. Our research goal was to identify the driving forces behind the increase in burned area in the arid grasslands of southern Russia. Our study area encompassed 19,000 km2 in the Republic of Kalmykia in southern Russia. We analyzed annual burned area from 1986 to 2006 as a function of livestock population, NDVI, precipitation, temperature, and broad-scale oscillation indices using best subset regressions and structural equation modeling. Our results supported the hypothesis that vegetation recovered within 5–6 years after the livestock declined in the beginning of the 1990s, to a point at which large fires could be sustained. Climate was an important explanatory factor for burning, but mainly after 1996 when lower livestock numbers allowed fuels to accumulate. Ultimately, our results highlight the complexity of coupled human-natural systems, and provide an example of how abrupt socioeconomic change may affect fire regimes.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge support for this research by the NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program, a NASA Earth System Science Dissertation Fellowship for M. Dubinin (07-Earth07F-0053), and the National Geographic Society. We are thankful for J. Burton’s help with structural equation modeling and N. Keuler’s assistance with statistics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, Wisconsin, 53706, USA

    Maxim Dubinin & Volker C. Radeloff

  2. Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, 33 Leninskiy prospect, Moscow, 119071, Russia

    Anna Luschekina

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  1. Maxim Dubinin
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Correspondence to Maxim Dubinin.

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Author Contributions

MD designed study, performed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper; AL designed study, contributed new methods, performed research; VR performed research, wrote the paper.

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Dubinin, M., Luschekina, A. & Radeloff, V.C. Climate, Livestock, and Vegetation: What Drives Fire Increase in the Arid Ecosystems of Southern Russia?. Ecosystems 14, 547–562 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-011-9427-9

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