The wild fires retrospective analysis in the national park «Krasnoyarsk Stolby»

Here we analyzed the data on the burning of the territory of the national park «Krasnoyarsk Stolby» annually recorded in the protected area and the buffer zone as part of long-term observations of natural processes. Information on fires was summarized starting from 1942 onwards and converted into the ArcGis database. A digital model of the fire history in the national park has been obtained, which includes 176 fire sites (610 tax. divisions), 40 (58 tax. divisions) of which are known by repeated fires. A retrospective analysis of the actual burning of forests in this territory for the period from 1942 to 2020 was carried out. The frequency of fires and burnout areas differ significantly for different functional zones of the national park, depending on the protection regime. The most frequently combustible (2.4 events per year) are sites with a recreational use regime, where the interval between fires not exceeding 2 years. The largest burned sites were in the strict strictly protected zone in 1956 and 2002. Ground fires of low and medium intensity became predominant over the entire period. In terms of area coverage, the most extensive fires occurred in the period from 1997 to 2006 with 1744 hectares covered by fires, including repeated fires in the same areas in different years. The joint analysis of the maps of the burning of the territory and the data on forest types showed that most fires for all considered period took place in stands where the dominant species was Scots pine Рinus sylvestris L. (59 %). The strictly protected zone of the national park is the least protected from major fires in the future, due to the high class of natural fire hazard in recent years because of the massive drying up of conifer stands (mainly fir) and a high degree of accumulation of forest fuel due to the long absence of fires in the protected area as a whole.