Nat climatechangeThis recent paper in Nature Climate Change by Sander Veraverbeke and others discusses how changes in climate and fire regimes are transforming boreal forests. The authors use climate, lightning, fire and vegetation data to assess the mechanisms contributing to large fire years and find an increase in lightening ignitions, which drives interannual and long-term ignition and burned area dynamics in boreal North America. This implies future ignition increases may increase carbon loss while accelerating the northward expansion of boreal forest. This paper can be accessed on the Nature Climate Change website. Note that it is not open access.

This paper acknowledges the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)