Fires on Ice: Emerging fire regimes, local communities and new infrastructure development in the permafrost areas of the Russia’s Subarctic Taiga

Keywords: Zombie fires, taiga, permafrost, indigenous infrastructure, Evenki
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59

Abstract

Low-intensity fires, including smoldering fires (so-called “zombie fires”), increasingly become a point of wide concern in the Arctic. While there is a growing body of literature on smoldering and peatland fires, their detection is difficult and needs ground truthing for understanding. Local and Indigenous knowledge is becoming the most useful source of such information. Interviews collected and analyzed for this paper indicate that permafrost and wildfires are intertwined in respect to the “zombie fires” phenomenon. Although “zombie fires” are not new in the Siberian taiga, the number of witness accounts of smoldering wildfires have significantly increased with new infrastructure development in the last 5 years. These observations are also confirmed by satellite remote sensing data. Local residents in the two study sites (Evenki and old-settler communities of Tokma and Khanda villages in the Irkutsk Region of Russia ravaged by forest fires in the last several seasons) observe that wildfires over swamps and permafrost prevalent areas have different characteristics than in the rest of the forest. First, they usually have not been ignited there during a fire season, but either spread from the surrounding taiga or start in fall or winter. Second, the fire danger period for swamplands is much longer than estimated for this latitude. In addition, reports on wildfire-caused losses focus on resources that have some economic value for extraction, such as some cubic meters of wood. Losses of indigenous infrastructure and reindeer habitat are not taken into account.