Fire seasonality identification with multimodality tests

Abstract

Understanding the role of vegetation fires in the Earth system has become an important environmental problem. Although fires time occurrence is mainly influenced by climate, human activity related with land use and management has altered fire patterns in several regions of the world. Hence, for a better insight in fires regimes, it is of special interest to analyze where human activity has influenced the fire seasonality. For doing so, multimodality tests are a useful tool for determining the number of fire peaks along the year. The periodicity of climatological and human--altered fires and their complex distributional features motivate the use of the nonparametric circular statistics. The unsatisfactory performance of previous nonparametric proposals for testing multimodality, in the circular case, justifies the introduction of a new approach, accompanied by a correction of the False Discovery Rate with spatial dependence for a systematic application of the tests in a large area between Russia and Kazakhstan.