Fig. 1. Fire regime zones in the Canadian boreal forest and the 160 studied communities.

The four case study communities are named (pink dots on map). The fire activity index, rated from low to extreme (scaled from one to five dots), is a combination of fire size (FS), fire frequency (FF), and burn rate (BR)³⁰. The seasonality index represents the season in which >65% of the total annual area burned: spring, summer, or mixed when no season dominates. The proportion of area burned during spring is indicated in parenthesis. The ignition source represents the type of ignition that caused >65% of the annual number of fires: human- or lightning-caused, or mixed when no cause dominates. The m suffix for the zones 11 and 12 refers to a mountainous topography. Note that some zones are geographically discontinuous; zones 9 and 10 are nonboreal, and therefore not considered for analysis. This figure was created using QGIS 3.10.0, under GNU General Public License v2, 1991 (gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html).