ArticlePloS one2018
Fire forbids fifty-fifty forest.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- How climate, Indigenous people, and fire shaped Brazil's Araucaria Forests through the Late Holocene.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Spatial modeling of forest-savanna bistability: impacts of fire dynamics and timescale separation.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Topography is a Major Determinant of Forest-Savanna Distributions in Mosaic Landscapes in Central Africa.Ecosystems (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- The use of fire to preserve biodiversity under novel fire regimes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Shifting equilibria in a warming boreal forest.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Boreal forests are heading for an open state.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Monitoring the Multiple Stages of Climate Tipping Systems from Space: Do the GCOS Essential Climate Variables Meet the Needs?Surveys in geophysics · 2025Review
- Cooperative control of environmental extremes by artificial intelligent agents.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Fire, environmental and anthropogenic controls on pantropical tree cover.Communications earth & environment · 2024Article
- Emergent structure and dynamics of tropical forest-grassland landscapes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Feedback in tropical forests of the Anthropocene.Global change biology · 2022Review
- Hydroclimatic adaptation critical to the resilience of tropical forests.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent studies have interpreted patterns of remotely sensed tree cover as evidence that forest with intermediate tree cover might be unstable in the tropics, as it will tip into either a closed forest or a more open savanna state. Here we show that across all continents the frequency of wildfires rises sharply as tree cover falls below ~40%. Using a simple empirical model, we hypothesize that the steepness of this pattern causes intermediate tree cover (30‒60%) to be unstable for a broad range of assumptions on tree growth and fire-driven mortality. We show that across all continents, observed frequency distributions of tropical tree cover are consistent with this hypothesis. We argue that percolation of fire through an open landscape may explain the remarkably universal rise of fire frequency around a critical tree cover, but we show that simple percolation models cannot predict the actual threshold quantitatively. The fire-driven instability of intermediate states implies that tree cover will not change smoothly with climate or other stressors and shifts between closed forest and a state of low tree cover will likely tend to be relatively sharp and difficult to reverse.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.