Monitoring trends in global vegetation fire hot spots using MODIS data

We identified hot spots trends in global vegetation fires based on 10-year long MODIS fire products. Additionally, we analyzed the occurrence of fire hot spots across climate zones, global land cover and global biodiversity hot spots. Fire hot spot zones were delineated by combining annual fire data with spatial statistics and space–time pattern mining. Spatial analysis shows no statistically significant trends of increase or decrease of vegetation fires from 2011 to 2020. Within the global vegetation fire hot spots, intensifying hot spots (38.1%) dominate followed by consecutive hot spots (30.5%), persistent hot spots (14.2%), sporadic hot spots (6.2%), oscillating hot spots (4.6%) and new hot spots (3.5%). The results shows that Africa has the highest fire hot spot area in the world which was dominated by a tropical savanna and hot semi-arid (steppe) climates. Future efforts should be focused towards the standardization of the techniques to enable identification of near real time vulnerable zones, predict fire risk areas, and evaluation of the management effectiveness for climate change mitigation and conservation policies.