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Forest fires in the Himalayas typically occur between November and June, during the drier months. However, out-of-season and higher elevation fires have sparked concerns about their effective management in a changing climate. A new study from the Western Himalayas provides more clues into the underlying factors driving forest fires in the region.

A higher frequency of forest fires was associated with a decline in floristic diversity and the promotion of fire-dominant plant species in Uttarakhand – the most fire-prone state in the Indian Western Himalayas, according to the Forest Survey of India.

Fires in the Himalayas are also particularly worrisome because they threaten to erode carbon stocks. Including the Eastern Himalayas, the Himalayan forests are estimated to hold 3,273.1 million tonnes of carbon.

For the Western Himalaya study, researchers from the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, and Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, considered a host of bioclimatic, anthropogenic, and topical variables that could influence forest fire dynamics in the region. “What we tried to do was study 10 years of past data to understand how these variables interact with each other. Temperature had the biggest edge out of all of them,” said Amit Kumar Verma, a senior technical officer and faculty member with the Forest Research Institute (FRI) who authored the study.