Our research paper on the social and environmental drivers of the 2015 fires in Sumatra has just been accepted in the journal of Environmental Research Letters. A great team effort from Jocelyne Sze, a research associate in my lab, Jefferson, an undergraduate who compiled data on land conflicts in our study site and myself.
The motivation for producing this paper was a gap in recent literature on the social drivers of fires in Indonesia. The last paper which pulled together a study on the social and environmental factors of fires in Indonesia was Stolle & Lambin (2003) and Stolle et al. (2003). We adapted their framework and included new social and environmental variables that could influence fire count (regency-level) and occurrence (1 km pixel-level) in our study provinces of Riau, Jambi and South Sumatra. We found that more rainfall, flat areas and low population density were most important variables that predicted fires at both the regency- and pixel-scale. Economic variables such as a higher proportion of small-scale (< 10ha) and medium-scale (10-100ha) plantation landholdings, and higher reported use of fires to clear agricultural lands in villages led to higher fire counts at the regency-level. At the pixel-level, proximity to roads and repeatedly burnt peatlands led to a higher probability of fire occurrence. For more information on our article, please see our accepted manuscript here. References Stolle, F. and E. F. Lambin (2003). "Interprovincial and interannual differences in the causes of land-use fires in Sumatra, Indonesia." Environmental Conservation 30(4): 375-387. Stolle, F., et al. (2003). "Land use and vegetation fires in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia." Forest Ecology and Management 179(1): 277-292.
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