Fig. 5
From: Fire regimes of the Southern Appalachians may radically shift under climate change
The change in the burned area attributed to drought and drought variability. a The total area burned during a 90-year simulation in our process-based, paired fire, and landscape change models for four selected climate models that represent a range of future drought conditions. Error bars represent the 95% CI across models. b Hectares burned per decade under the four selected climate models. Dots represent individual model runs and the trend line represents a LOESS smoothed model. High T represents a major drought trend, while Low T represents a minor drought trend. High V represents high variability, while Low V represents low variability. The historical simulation’s climate is years drawn randomly from the years 1979–2016. 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