Abstract:
Wildland fire is a fundamental ecological process, yet in sensitive regions it can generate significant impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and landscape resilience. In the first part of this presentation, I will briefly introduce the broader body of fire-related research conducted within my affiliation at Dali University’s Institute of Eastern-Himalaya Biodiversity Research and the Center for Interdisciplinary Science. This includes long-term work on fire ecology, remote sensing of burned areas, climate–fire interactions, land-cover dynamics, and fire-risk modelling across Northwest Yunnan and the Eastern Himalaya — an area characterized by exceptional biodiversity and increasing exposure to anthropogenic and climatic pressures. Building on this broader foundation, the second part of the talk will focus on a new global-scale project examining how fire regimes behave along international land borders. Using long-term satellite fire products combined with environmental and land-use datasets, we analyze fire activity within a standardized 5 km buffer on each side of all terrestrial international borders. This design allows direct, side-by-side comparison of fire intensity, frequency, seasonality, and landscape associations under broadly similar environmental conditions. Results reveal strong and persistent asymmetries: in many border segments, one side exhibits significantly higher fire activity than the other, especially in areas that experience extremely high fire activity. These differences cannot be explained solely by climate, terrain or vegetation, pointing instead to the influence of land-use practices, management systems and institutional settings. A simple harmonization scenario suggests that reducing high-fire borders to their lower-fire neighbors could prevent ~14,000 fires per year, many in biodiversity-rich frontiers, underscoring the need for strengthened transboundary fire governance.
Speaker: Dr. Davide Fornacca
Affiliation: Institute of Eastern-Himalaya Biodiversity Research, Dali University, Yunnan, China
Time: 4:30 PM, Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Venue: Offline: The Conference Hall in XTBG
Online: Tencent Meeting ID: 114 254 734
