Climate variability and forest fire dynamics in Himachal Pradesh, India

Forest fires are recognized as a major threat to a significant global challenge for ecosystem stability. In the recent past the state experienced rise in forest fire events. Therefore, the present study provides an overview of forest fire events in Himachal Pradesh, along with its relationship between climatic attributes. The fire events mostly occur during summer and monsoon season. Therefore, the fire data was collected for said seasons from Fire information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) portal from 2004 to 2024. The findings reveal an increase in forest fire events from 132 in 2004 to 1358 in 2024. The Solan district reported the highest number of forest fire events of 274 in both the seasons in 2024. Therefore, Solan district was selected for exploring the relationship between fire incidents and climatic attributes. The change point detection and Mann–Kendall test have been applied for trend analysis. The results analyzed significant rising trend for maximum and mean temperatures for August and September while diurnal temperature showed significant increasing trend for April month. The summer series of temperature showed significant change point around (1997) and confirmed the homogeneity at 95% confidence level. The Angstrom index (AI) and Fuel moisture index (FMI) were also computed for the prediction of forest fire incidents. The indicators proved effective for monitoring fire incidents the AI values below 2.0 and FMI values below 15.0 in 2024 were associated with maximum number of fire incidents. The correlation analysis indicated a positive correlation between fire events, potential evapotranspiration and mean temperature ( P ≤ 0.01 and ≤ 0.05). In addition to Principal component analysis (PCA), two components (PCI and II) contributed about 63.8% and 64.9% of variability during summer and monsoon season and indicated that potential evapotranspiration, mean and diurnal temperatures have highest positive loading with forest fire incidents. The study underscores the increasing role of climate in forest fire incidents and emphasizes the need for extensive ground-level studies for effective forest fire management. Enhancing region-specific knowledge, understanding fuel types and their characteristics, and recording high-resolution hourly climatic data to analyze fire-related indices at a micro level.