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Region: Economics and Sociology

2014 year, number 1

Fires in Siberian Boreal Forests: Causes and Impacts

Yury Samsonov1, Galina Ivanova2
1V.V. Voevodsky Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion, SB RAS, Novosibirsk
2V.N. Sukachev Institute of Forest, SB RAS, Novosibirsk
Keywords: forest resources, combustion of the forest biomass, forest fire, smoke emission, weather and climate changes, ecologic and economic damage from fires

Abstract

The authors carried out more than thirty simulative fire experiments in the forests of Krasnoyarsk Krai within the framework of the international projects on fires in boreal forests. We obtained the representative and statistically-valid experimental data on how wildfires behave in the conditions of Siberian climate and landscape; what energy combustion properties of the forest biomass are; what smoke emissions into atmosphere are and how they impact on the chemical, optic, and respiratory properties of the near-earth atmosphere as well as weather and climate; to what degree, depending on fire intensity, the forest stand is destructed after fires; how physical and chemical properties of the forest soils can change; how fires impact on forest biocoenosis; and for how long bio-coenosis can be restored after wildfires. In practice, almost all fires in Siberian taiga forests are surface ones and they are spread on the forest ground cover. The experiments show that a share of the destructed trees is 10-15% when combustion intensity is not so high. This means that the softwood timber stand may well survive three-five fires with intervals approximately of 30—10 years over its natural productive life. The data obtained could be applied to assessing ecologic and economic damages from fires happened in the pine and larch forests commonly observed in Siberia.