Publications

Engle, B; Bratoev, I; Crowley, MA; Zhu, YN; Senf, C (2025). Distribution and characteristics of lightning-ignited wildfires in boreal forests - the BoLtFire database. EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE DATA, 17(6), 2249-2276.

Abstract
The frequency and severity of fire weather have been projected to increase under climate change, particularly in high-latitude boreal forests. Lightning, a key ignition source globally, is also expected to become more frequent with climate change and could significantly increase burn area. Current research on lightning-ignited wildfire (LIWs) has a long history in boreal ecosystems but has typically focused on North America due to better data availability, while the lack of publicly available data for Eurasia has hindered our comprehensive understanding of important characteristics of LIWs, such as holdover time, lightning ignition efficiency, frequency, and spatial distribution in boreal forests. This study introduces the temporal minimum distance (TMin) method, a novel approach to matching lightning strikes with wildfires without requiring ignition location that outperformed current methodologies. As a result, we developed a comprehensive dataset of lightning-ignited wildfires across the entire boreal forest from 2012 to 2022, encompassing 6902 fires, 4201 in Eurasia and 2701 in North America, each over 200 ha in size. This dataset (10.5281/zenodo.14940326, Engle et al., 2024) provides new opportunities to model the ignition and spread dynamics of boreal wildfires and offers deeper insights into lightning-driven fire activity globally.

DOI:
10.5194/essd-17-2249-2025

ISSN:
1866-3516