Landscape fires disproportionally affect high conservation value temperate peatlands, meadows, and deciduous forests,...

Landscape fires are a natural component of the Earth System. However, they are of growing global concern due to climate change exacerbating their multiple impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, carbon storage, human health, economies, and wider society. Temperate regions are predicted to be at greatest risk of increasing fire activity due to climate change, where fires can seriously impact important ecosystems for biodiversity and carbon storage, such as peatlands and forests. There is insufficient literature on the background prevalence, distribution, and drivers of fires in these regions, especially within Europe, to assess and mitigate their risks. Using a global database of fire patches based on the MODIS FireCCI51 product, we address this knowledge gap by quantifying the current prevalence and size of fires in Polesia, a 150,000 km² area comprising a mosaic of peatland, forest, and agricultural habitats in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. Between 2001 and 2019, fires burned 31,062 km² of land, and were most frequent in spring and autumn. Although most fires started in agricultural land, fires disproportionately affected natural and semi-natural land cover types, particularly in protected areas. Over one fifth of protected land burned. Coniferous forests were the most common land cover type in protected areas, but fires mostly occurred in meadows, open peatlands (especially fen and transition mires), and native deciduous forests. These land cover types were highly susceptible to fires under low soil moisture conditions, but the risk of fire was low under average or higher soil moisture conditions. Restoring and maintaining natural hydrological regimes could be an effective nature-based solution to increase the resilience of fire-vulnerable ecosystems and support global biodiversity and carbon storage commitments under the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change and Convention on Biological Diversity.