Burning issues: statistical analyses of global fire data to inform assessments of environmental change

Global pyrogeographic study is necessary to inform climate change impact assessments used for management and decision‐making. Climate is a strong driver of spatial and temporal patterns of fire such that ongoing climate change is expected to alter global fire activity. A growing number of statistical–correlative analyses examine environmental drivers of current patterns of global fire occurrence or burned area, but few studies ask important “what if” questions about the potential future of fire under scenarios of a changing climate. Accordingly, our goal is to engage the broader statistical community in analysis of global fire data products to spur further understanding of fire regimes and the complex links they demonstrate between the biosphere and atmosphere. We provide an overview of constraints over fire regimes and the role of fire in the biosphere–atmosphere, describe general approaches being used for global fire–climate assessment, summarize opportunities and pitfalls in the public‐access global fire datasets, and highlight thinking on next steps for analysis of global fire and fire regime data. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.