ArticleGlobal change biology2021
The role of fire in global forest loss dynamics.
Article in Global change biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 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.
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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
19 citing papers in PubMed, 180 citations in OpenAlex.
- Escalating Fire-Driven Forest Loss in Protected Tropical Forests.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Mechanisms and scales in modeling forest responses to changing disturbance regimes.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Climate-driven upward spread of forest fires in European mountain regions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Land use-induced soil carbon loss in the dry tropics nearly offsets gains in northern lands.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The weak land carbon sink hypothesis.Science advances · 2025Review
- Large live biomass carbon losses from droughts in the northern temperate ecosystems during 2016-2022.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Enhanced CHNature communications · 2025Article
- Seasonal spatial-temporal trends of vegetation recovery in burned areas across Africa.PloS one · 2025Article
- Forest edges are globally warmer than interiors and exceed optimal temperatures for vegetation productivity.Communications earth & environment · 2025Article
- Impacts of fire and prospects for recovery in a tropical peat forest ecosystem.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Global forest fragmentation change from 2000 to 2020.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Mapping Fire Severity in Southwest China Using the Combination of Sentinel 2 and GF Series Satellite Images.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Madagascar's fire regimes challenge global assumptions about landscape degradation.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Nucleation sites and forest recovery under high shrub competition.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2022Observational
- Escalating carbon emissions from North American boreal forest wildfires and the climate mitigation potential of fire management.Science advances · 2022Article
- Article
- Changes in land use enhance the sensitivity of tropical ecosystems to fire-climate extremes.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Fires, among other forms of natural and anthropogenic disturbance, play a central role in regulating the location, composition and biomass of forests. Understanding the role of fire in global forest loss is crucial in constraining land-use change emissions and the global carbon cycle. We analysed the relationship between forest loss and fire at 500 m resolution based on satellite-derived data for the 2003-2018 period. Satellite fire data included burned area and active fire detections, to best account for large and small fires, respectively. We found that, on average, 38 ± 9% (± range) of global forest loss was associated with fire, and this fraction remained relatively stable throughout the study period. However, the fraction of fire-related forest loss varied substantially on a regional basis, and showed statistically significant trends in key tropical forest areas. Decreases in the fraction of fire-related forest loss were found where deforestation peaked early in our study period, including the Amazon and Indonesia while increases were found for tropical forests in Africa. The inclusion of active fire detections accounted for 41%, on average, of the total fire-related forest loss, with larger contributions in small clearings in interior tropical forests and human-dominated landscapes. Comparison to higher-resolution fire data with resolutions of 375 and 20 m indicated that commission errors due to coarse resolution fire data largely balanced out omission errors due to missed small fire detections for regional to continental-scale estimates of fire-related forest loss. Besides an improved understanding of forest dynamics, these findings may help to refine and separate fire-related and non-fire-related land-use change emissions in forested ecosystems.
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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.