Percent change in biomass consumed by fire for the USA and Canada simulated by the MC1 model and based on climate projections from the CSIRO Mk3.0 GCM for the SRES A2 emission scenario.

Percent change in biomass consumed by fire is calculated for 50 year periods for the historical period and for the future (2050-2099 versus 1951-2000. Percent change is calculated as ((future – historical/historical) x 100). These are results from the NA8K version of MC1. MC1 is a dynamic vegetation model for estimating the distribution of vegetation and associated ecosystem fluxes of carbon, nutrients, and water. It was created to assess the potential impacts of global climate change on ecosystem structure and function at a wide range of spatial scales from landscape to global. The model incorporates transient dynamics to make predictions about the patterns of ecological change. MC1 was created by combining physiologically based biogeographic rules defined in the MAPSS model with a modified version of the biogeochemical model, CENTURY. MC1 includes a fire module, MCFIRE, that mechanistically simulates the occurrence and impacts of fire events. Climate input data sources for this particular run include the Climatic Research Unit (CRU TS 2.0), the Canadian Forest Service, and Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM). CRU data was used to provide the variability (based on anomalies) and CFS and PRISM were used to provide the mean climate for 1961-1990. Alaska and conterminous USA soil was gridded from STATSGO and NATSGO data by Jeff Kern. Canadian soil came from the North American Generalized Soil Data Set (NAGSOIL), Version 0.2.