Fig. 1
From: Fire regimes of the Southern Appalachians may radically shift under climate change
Study area of the Southern Appalachians as defined by Omerik’s (1995) blue ridge ecosystem. Here we show four separate maps of the study area which contains portions of Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The Southern Appalachians is a diverse and heterogeneous region as shown by A the wide ranging and complex elevation (Gesch et al. 2018), B the differing types of ownership (Noonan-Wright et al. 2021), C the wildland–urban interfaces (WUI: Radeloff et al. 2018), and D separate climate regions varying in precipitation and temperature profiles (Thornton et al. 2014; Figs. S1-S3). In this study, we used the LANDIS-II model to simulate the Southern Appalachians, USA, under four CMIP5 climate scenarios representing increased drought trend, increased drought variability, their combination, and a scenario with neither increase. These simulations were compared to the historical climate and each other to understand changes in fire patterns and landscape-scale changes in species composition and biomass