Fires on Ice: Emerging Permafrost Peatlands Fire Regimes in Russia’s Subarctic Taiga
, Elena Rasputina 2, Irina Bilichenko 2, Natalia Krasnoshtanova 2, Viktor Bogdanov 2 and Andrey N. Petrov 4,*
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Fires on Ice: Emerging permafrost peatlands fire regimes in the Russia’s Subarctic Taiga
Kuklina et al.
This paper examines sociological issues related to smoldering fires in deep duff in Siberian taiga. Smoldering fires are poorly detected by remote sensing. Detection and suppression is often performed by local people engaged in subsistence activities. The paper is well written, easy to follow, and could be published with minimal edits.
The title could be more descriptive of the content, perhaps a suggestion of the citizen science involved, its focus on smoldering rather than flaming fire, remotely sensed heat detections, and/or tensions in fire management between extractive and subsistence activities. Do fire regimes are descriptions so it seems they can change but do they emerge?
Remove keywords that appear in the title.
The authors' presentation of fire regime is a little awkward, perhaps because of cultural differences. The "emerging fire regimes" seems to mean changes in human activities that affect fire activity or management. So is it the fire regime that is changing or the human activity? Are perceived increases in detection of smoldering fires due to increasing human presence in the forest? Or to climate change? Is there any more historical background information on the prevalence of smoldering peat fires and overwintering fires?
Line 33. "rapid fires" = flaming fires?
Line 45. Instead of the emotional term "catastrophic" consider, e.g., "severe".
Line 46. 1.5 times more than typical?
Line 107 is redundant with line 96.
Line 266. I think "intensive" should be "extensive" as in the fires extended over great area?
Line 295. Fireweed is "Chamerion angustifolium". Please italicize.
Line 340. Again, find a better term than "catastrophic". Here, "extensive" might fit.
Line 350. Maybe I am not reading this right but it seems obvious that "previously burned areas were the most prone to reburning". Could it be any other way?
Line 367. I think "put up fires" should be "put out fires"?
Line 392, 404. This is probably an item for the editor but these quoted sections use ridiculously small font that is hard to read.
Figure 8. A figure is probably not needed. It also seems to me that the scene is misleading. The scene appears to depict a relatively light burn and the smoldering that is seen is a log rather than peat.
Author Response
RE: Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for positive and helpful reviews. We addressed your comments and suggestions in the paper revisions. Please find our answers to particular comments below:
The title could be more descriptive of the content, perhaps a suggestion of the citizen science involved, its focus on smoldering rather than flaming fire, remotely sensed heat detections, and/or tensions in fire management between extractive and subsistence activities. Do fire regimes are descriptions so it seems they can change but do they emerge?
RE: We considered different options suggested by the reviewer and determined that the current title captures the content the best, because all the listed issues are very important for this paper, but do not constitute the entire content of this paper.
Remove keywords that appear in the title.
RE: We changed taiga and peatlands for boreal forest in the list of keywords
The authors' presentation of fire regime is a little awkward, perhaps because of cultural differences. The "emerging fire regimes" seems to mean changes in human activities that affect fire activity or management. So is it the fire regime that is changing or the human activity?
RE: As described in this paper, both fire regimes and human activity are changing that add complexity to the problem
Are perceived increases in detection of smoldering fires due to increasing human presence in the forest?
RE: No, because we rely on local and Indigenous knowledge who have been present in the forest for multiple generations
Or to climate change?
RE: It is a good question that needs to be further examined, but some indication is provided in Figure 3 and in the broader literature.
Is there any more historical background information on the prevalence of smoldering peat fires and overwintering fires?
RE: There are neither prior records nor witnesses of smoldering and overwintering fires in the study area
Line 33. "rapid fires" = flaming fires?
RE: We added “flaming” for clarification
Line 45. Instead of the emotional term "catastrophic" consider, e.g., "severe".
RE: Has been corrected as suggested.
Line 46. 1.5 times more than typical?
RE: Has been corrected as suggested.
Line 107 is redundant with line 96.
RE: Has been corrected as suggested.
Line 266. I think "intensive" should be "extensive" as in the fires extended over a great area?
RE: We use data on fire intensity which is measured by Fire Radiative Power (FRP). High values of FRP indicate intensive fires.
Line 295. Fireweed is "Chamerion angustifolium". Please italicize.
RE: Has been corrected as suggested.
Line 340. Again, find a better term than "catastrophic". Here, "extensive" might fit.
RE: Has been corrected as suggested.
Line 350. Maybe I am not reading this right but it seems obvious that "previously burned areas were the most prone to reburning". Could it be any other way?
RE: Removed “re” to ensure that the point is correctly conveyed.
Line 367. I think "put up fires" should be "put out fires"?
RE: We changed “Put up fires” for “extinguish”
Line 392, 404. This is probably an item for the editor but these quoted sections use ridiculously small font that is hard to read.
RE: We increased font and italicized to make quotes distinguishable from the main text
Figure 8. A figure is probably not needed. It also seems to me that the scene is misleading. The scene appears to depict a relatively light burn and the smoldering that is seen is a log rather than peat.
RE: The figure was removed as suggested.
Reviewer 2 Report
In this paper the authors study wildfires in two areas of the Siberia Taiga presenting a 20 year time series of fire intensity derived from satellite observations, as well as a before and after comparison of burn area after the most intense period of burning since 2014. Additionally, they go on to interview local people about fires in the area and present unique insights into fire severity, fire characteristics and fire impacts that are usually absent from the literature.
First, I would like to say It was a pleasure for me to read and review this work. Field based verification of remote sensing studies are very much needed. By traveling to regions that have experienced peat fires and speaking with local people the authors have shown something that is very important, namely that if we rely on only remote sensing many peat fires will go unnoticed. Additionally the GIS work they authors present is interesting in its own right and clearly shows the link between recent extreme weather and wildfire.
I really like the combination of the GIS work with the interviews and the local knowledge, the combination provides a comprehensive assessment of both the intent of the burning and the impacts on local people.
I can find no fault either the social science or the GIS work the authors present. In both cases, the description of the procedures used are meticulous. The limitations of the data are appropriately discussed and I consider the conclusions drawn to be fully supported by the data.
I recommend this paper is published pending some clarification and some very minor language corrections which I will list below. I wish the authors the best of luck with their future work which I will be watching closely.
See the list of minor issues below:
L17: should be “in the Irkutsk region”
L36: suggest “fires that burn in permafrost peatlands can occur at a very low intensity that is difficult to detect by satellite”
L39: suggest “knowledge gap” the reverse, “gap of knowledge” is a rather strange way to say it in English
L42: should be “and due to risk of fire spreading downwards”
L44: Please clarify, should this be that peat fires can reach 15% of anthropogenic CO2 or GHG? And is it in any given year or just during the most intense time of burning?
L46: Please clarify in the text whether this per unit area or per fire event
L46 “high carbon emissions have been observed”
L49: A comma is needed to demarcate the clause “most often they occur, and are most threatening,”
L50: Should be plural, forests
L52: “suggest chemical composition can also prevent”
L61: “have an significant impact”
L67: “is of high demand”
L78:”a novel approach”
L82: remove “by”
L85: clarify if these are the authors own landscape observations
L103: Can this be verified by local charcoal records in the lakes or peatlands?
L168: Can the authors describe the “snowball method”? I have not come across this term
L212: should be “relationship”
L280 Should be “allowed us to identify key landscape types”
L288: “represent the recovery”
L337: is accuracy assessed by ground trothing? Can you clarify this here?
L511: should be “that have been”
Table 1: column header should be “change in burned area from 2013 to 2019”
Figure 2: Y axis label would be clearer as “number of participants”?
Figure 6 & Figure 7. Please define FRP in the caption and what its units may be
Author Response
RE: Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for positive and helpful reviews. We addressed your comments and suggestions in the paper revisions. Please find our answers to particular comments below:
L17: should be “in the Irkutsk region”
Has been corrected as suggested.
L36: suggest “fires that burn in permafrost peatlands can occur at a very low intensity that is difficult to detect by satellite”
Has been corrected as suggested
L39: suggest “knowledge gap” the reverse, “gap of knowledge” is a rather strange way to say it in English
Has been corrected as suggested
L42: should be “and due to risk of fire spreading downwards”
Has been corrected as suggested
L44: Please clarify, should this be that peat fires can reach 15% of anthropogenic CO2 or GHG? And is it in any given year or just during the most intense time of burning?
We added GHG that the authors were exploring in their paper
L46: Please clarify in the text whether this per unit area or per fire event
Clarified that it was per unit area
L46 “high carbon emissions have been observed”
Has been corrected as suggested
L49: A comma is needed to demarcate the clause “most often they occur, and are most threatening,”
Has been corrected as suggested
L50: Should be plural, forests
Has been corrected as suggested
L52: “suggest chemical composition can also prevent”
Has been corrected as suggested
L61: “have an significant impact”
Has been corrected as suggested with “a”
L67: “is of high demand”
Has been corrected as suggested
L78:”a novel approach”
Has been corrected as suggested
L82: remove “by”
Removal of “by” will change the meaning of sentence: we study the areas affected by infrastructure development
L85: clarify if these are the authors own landscape observations
We reformulated the sentence as follows: “sources of information which include authors’ own landscape observations, local and Indigenous communities’ knowledge, and remote sensing data”.
L103: Can this be verified by local charcoal records in the lakes or peatlands?
There is no charcoal records in the study area, so we cannot verify it
L168: Can the authors describe the “snowball method”? I have not come across this term
We added the following: “we asked our main partners to help with recruiting other participants who in turn helped with finding other respondents”
L212: should be “relationship”
Has been corrected as suggested
L280 Should be “allowed us to identify key landscape types”
Has been corrected as suggested
L288: “represent the recovery”
Has been corrected as suggested
L337: is accuracy assessed by ground trothing? Can you clarify this here?
We added explanation in the methods section and in the results section that about half of the points were based on ground truthing and added location of points of field studies at Figure 1.
L511: should be “that have been”
Has been corrected as suggested
Table 1: column header should be “change in burned area from 2013 to 2019”
Has been corrected as suggested
Figure 2: Y axis label would be clearer as “number of participants”?
Has been corrected as suggested
Figure 6 & Figure 7. Please define FRP in the caption and what its units may be
We have added units of measurement at the axes and added Fire Radiative Power in the caption
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
General
The paper topic, calling attention to peat fires in a taiga/tundra region of Siberia with scattered permafrost where the vegetation is not adapted to burn, is interesting and potentially publishable. It is important for highlighting an area on the forefront of global climate change and an associated major local-scale impact. I like the combination of local interviews with satellite data. However, the paper comes across as very qualitative. They are missing an opportunity to use the quantitative data that the satellites provide.
There is very little description of the satellite data processing done. After reading, I still have very little appreciation for how Landsat vs Sentinel vs Worldview data were used. There seems to be very little awareness of calibration issues for comparing sensors, if they are doing that like they have more clearly comparing FRP from the MODIS and VIIRS sensors. However, there too, how the FRP estimates were summarized for comparison is not described well.
There are no statistics used to determine if any of the results are significant.
The English writing is poorly phrased in many places and needs thorough editing.
Major comments
L45. The way this is phrased makes it sound like peat fires are included in the anthropogenic fire category, which is not definitive. This doesn’t preclude humans being the underlying cause for global warming that is creating conditions conducive to peat fires, but the relationship is indirect. By that definition, many kinds of what formerly were considered “natural” disturbance events could be considered “anthropogenic”.
L73. Change “on” to “in”.
L104. Insert “who” before “subsisted”.
L106. Change “of” to “from”.
Fig. 1. I don’t know what the word “raions” in the map legend means.
L138. Change “forestries that” to “foresters who”.
L139-145. This is a nonsensical run-on sentence that needs to be rewritten.
L203. I think you may want to delete “route of” in this context.
L215. It would be helpful to show these weather station locations in Fig. 1.
L228. Do you mean “median” values rather than “medium”?
L229. Change “imagery” to “images”.
L230. I count 6 land cover classes in Table 1, not 7.
L254. Are Landsat and VIIRS missing from this list of satellite sensors?
Fig. 3. The text in the figures is too small to read.
L269. The word “at” is misspelled.
L274. Change “proneness to wildfires” to “propensity to burn”.
L294. Delete “a”.
L298. Is “mar” missing a quotation mark, or should the quotation mark there now be deleted? I’m not sure if this is an English error of omission or commission.
Speaking of errors, where is the land cover classification error and accuracy matrix so briefly summarized in L234? This is a result, and should be reported (also with greater detail about what type of classifier was used and how it was trained) in the Results, not in the Methods.
L313-314. The figure caption is duplicated, above and below the figure. Tundra by definition is treeless, so the lower left vegetation type on p. 8 is misnamed.
L350. Reverse “huts rebuilding” to “rebuilding huts”.
L352-353. Change “create hindrance for” to “hinder”.
L355-356. This sentence is nonsensical as written.
L357. “Wildfires” is mis-capitalized.
L364-368. Is this text intended? There is no explanation for it.
L382-392. Is this text supposed to be in small font like the text referenced in my preceding comment above?
L420. Delete “e data”.
Fig. 7. The y axes are unlabeled with FRP units of power density. (Watts per meter squared). Moreover, the range of FRP values on the y axes varies greatly and needs to be standardized between the graphs. The satellite FRP data products should be calibrated measurements, meaning they can be compared between the sites to infer fire intensities.
L426. Delete “A”.
L471. Un-capitalize “Indigenous Knowledge”.
L503-511. The differences in the means and the standard deviations in these paired boxplots is negligible, and certainly not significant, so none of this description is supported. I’m assuming that these are standard deviation bars, but that needs to be specified in the Fig. 6 caption.
L530-541. This last paragraph should be in a Conclusions section separate from the Discussion.
Reviewer 2 Report
- Please mention what novelty or new thing from your research
- Please adjust your citation format according to the template and also how to write the reference
- Describe the structure of your research using the flowchart in the methods section
- On line 313, the caption of Figure 4, it looks like it shouldn't be in that position.
- On line 252, what manual method did you use to remove flare data from oil production sites? Please describe more clearly.
- Most fires on peatlands usually occur in open land. Do you also find this phenomenon in your research? If so, where did you explain it?
- Regarding the discussion and conclusion on line 469, you should separate it into different sections
- In line 370, you state that previously burned areas were the most prone to burning. What is the reason? Please explain.
- In general, your research makes sense, but you need to re-compile it so that something new from your research can be highlighted, especially you should mention it in the introduction and conclusion sections.
