Spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation fire in Al-Hasakeh and Ninewa governorates during the 2019 fire season

Sammanfattning

Vegetation fire is one of the naturally occurring disturbances within the Earth system, changing vegetation dynamics and modulating carbon storage in the terrestrial biosphere. While fires are essential to many ecosystems, fire dynamics have been increasingly shaped by human actions since the late eighteenth century. The main drivers behind those changes are climate change and direct human activity. From 1979 to 2013, one-quarter of Earth’s vegetated area have experienced a lengthening of the fire season as a result of increased aridity and drought. Human-caused alterations of the landscape such as intentional burning for clearing of land and expansion of urban area into natural environments influence occurrence, extent and severity of fires. Wildfires also have links to military activity, in the form of collateral damage from explosives but also as a military strategy to cause environmental destruction. During the 21st century (2001-2020), the Middle East GFED region has showed an increasing trend in burned area. Contributing to this trend is the unusual large fire outbreaks in Syria and Iraq in 2019. While a few papers have been published that investigate the drivers behind these fires, there are still questions to be answered. By focusing on the two governorates with the largest increase in fire activity/burned area in 2019 and using remote sensing products with higher spatial resolution than that of previous studies, this thesis aimed for contributing with further insights into the unusual fire season of 2019 in Syria and Iraq. The purpose was to explore the spatial distribution of vegetation fires in the governorates Al-Hasakeh in Syria and Ninewa in Iraq during the 2019 fire season, and investigate possible relations between the occurrence of vegetation fire and geopolitical and infrastructural factors. Global datasets on active fire, burned area and conflict events, and regional land cover data, were used for different types of GIS analysis, such as hot spot analysis (Getis-Ord Gi*) and nearest distance analysis. The hot spot analysis revealed that most of the hot spot locations for fire and conflict were not coincident, but that spatial overlap existed in the northwest of Al-Hasakeh where two clusters of hot spots were identified. For one of those clusters, there was also temporal overlap. This spatiotemporal window of increased fire and conflict event activity took place at the end of and post normal fire season, partly coincident with a major military operation along the Syria-Turkish border. Nearest distance analysis showed that fire occurrence decreased with increasing distance to the nearest major road, which is in line with results from other studies that investigated vegetation fire in semi-arid and/or Mediterranean climate contexts. Comparison of results from nearest distance analysis performed on active fire points and randomly generated points, indicated that the spatial distribution of active fire points was not random but associated with the major road network, in Al-Hasakeh as well as in Ninewa.