Regional modeling of large wildfires under current and potential future climates in Colorado and Wyoming, USA

Regional analysis of large wildfire potential given climate change scenarios is crucial to understanding areas most at risk in the future, yet wildfire models are not often developed and tested at this spatial scale. We fit three historical climate suitability models for large wildfires (i.e. ≥ 400 ha) in Colorado andWyoming using topography and decadal climate averages corresponding to wildfire occurrence at the same temporal scale. The historical models classified points of known large wildfire occurrence with high accuracies. Using a novel approach in wildfire modeling, we applied the historical models to independent climate and wildfire datasets, and the resulting sensitivities were 0.75, 0.81, and 0.83 for Maxent, Generalized Linear, and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, respectively. We projected the historic models into future climate space using data from 15 global circulation models and two representative concentration pathway scenarios. Maps from these geospatial analyses can be used to evaluate the changing spatial distribution of climate suitability of large wildfires in these states. April relative humidity was the most important covariate in all models, providing insight to the climate space of large wildfires in this region. These methods incorporate monthly and seasonal climate averages at a spatial resolution relevant to land management Climatic Change (2016) 134:565–577 DOI 10.1007/s10584-015-1553-5 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1553-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Amanda M. West [email protected] 1 Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA 2 Department of Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management, Colorado State University, 2150 Centre Ave Bldg. C, Fort Collins, CO 80526, USA 3 Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Colorado State University, 2150 Centre Ave Bldg. C, Fort Collins, CO 80526, USA 4 U.S. Geological Survey, Fort Collins Science Center, 2150 Centre Ave Bldg. C, Fort Collins, CO 80526, USA (i.e. 1 km) and provide a tool that can be modified for other regions of North America, or adapted for other parts of the world.