Collaborative research: the past, present, and future of boreal fire feedbacks

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Polar Programs will support collaborative research on boreal forest fire feedbacks from 2023 to 2027. The $138,467 award to the University of Colorado Denver will explore the paleohistory of short interval fires in boreal forests through analysis of lake sediment cores. Fieldwork will determine the resilience of current landscapes to short interval fires and whether these are creating novel forest structures. High-performance computing models will simulate fire behavior in current and future forest compositions under climate change. The research will inform expectations for wildfire and energy balance responses in the boreal region. Additional funding uses include training graduate and undergraduate students, organizing a science communication workshop, and refining a teaching model on carbon-vegetation-fire interactions for high school students. The NSF's Polar Programs aim to expand fundamental polar region knowledge and understanding through basic research.

Abstract

Boreal forests circle the globe and contain some of the largest carbon stocks on the planet. Locked in the trees and soil, this carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere. But as the climate warms, fires are becoming more and more common ? And while wildfire is not unusual in the boreal, the increasing frequency of burning is surpassing what the forests have evolved to tolerate, leading to forest loss and permafrost thaw. We do not know what comes next. IT is possible that if the forest fails to recover from high frequency fires, grasses and shrubs may take over, further increasing flammability. Or they may dampen future fire activity. This project takes a unique look at fires in the boreal, by investigating the deep history of fire through lake sediment cores where you can see the history of fire over thousands of years, through fieldwork to determine how resilient the landscape is now, and through high-performance computer models to estimate how fires will behave in the future. The project spans many timescales and pushes computing powers to the limit and will inform expectations of the future for this biome and the planet. The project will train graduate students, undergraduate students, and postdoctoral scholars, organize a two-day science communication workshop, and refine a fire teaching model used to teach high schoolers about carbon-vegetation-fire interactions. Using an integrative and dynamic approach, this project will combine existing and newly collected sediment data to explore the paleohistory of short interval fires in the boreal with CO-located fieldwork in short-interval fire areas. Although IT is known that modern fire frequency is passing historical norms, this project will go further, to determine if current short interval fires are creating novel structures. Those structures are the basis for fire behavior in the future, so the researchers will then combine those measurements with modern, physics-based fluid dynamics modeling of fire behavior that can simulate wind in close canopies and in novel forest structures further, this model will be extended to incorporate soil effects, critical in the boreal. This is the only available way to explore the fire implications of truly novel species assemblages and structures that seem to be emerging. Together, this work will explore fire likelihood feedbacks and structural thresholds associated with fire behavior in the boreal forest and inform expectations about how the region will respond, in terms of wildfire and energy balance, to climate warming. The project will work with the non-profit compass to organize a two-day science communication workshop for graduate students and scientists in the larger academic community. They will also work with concord consortium to develop a module tool for teaching highschoolers, working with teachers to solicit feedback. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.