Including prescribed burning in fire modelling: a case study from the Brazilian Cerrado using the JULES-INFERNO model

Prescribed burning (PB) is an important prevention activity under fire management. Similarly to other fire-prone settings, PB in the Cerrado is often implemented in protected areas to prevent intense wildfires in the drier months. We modelled burned area and fire carbon emissions in the Cerrado with the JULES-INFERNO model over a 30-year period (1990-2019), to evaluate the impacts of PB on a biome-scale. We first improve representation of the Cerrado in JULES-INFERNO, then simulate PB by setting an additional ignition to C4 grass during the early dry season. This is a counterfactual experiment where the PB additional set-up can be adapted to other regions worldwide. Over the 30 years, PB applied in the early dry season reduced burned area and fire emissions in the late dry season by 9.28% year-1 and 11.24% year-1, respectively, when compared to the non-PB scenario. In years with increased fire activity, the reductions are higher than average. Our results are not effective on the annual balance. Our sensitivity experiment with increased EDS burnings suggests that shifting fire activity earlier in the season may reduce the impacts of uncontrolled fires in the Cerrado.To our knowledge, this is one of the few studies to explicitly include PB within a dynamic vegetation model, and to adjust a global model to better represent the Cerrado’s fire predictions. Prospective studies are recommended to improve the understanding of the model’s performance, including analysis of modelled parameters such as the C4 grass post-fire recovery, and the integration between observational and modelled data.