Recent Fire Regimes in the Etosha National Park and Adjacent Areas in Northern Namibia

We reviewed the recent fire regimes in the semi-arid savannas of Etosha National Park and adjacent areas in northern Namibia using MODIS satellite imagery from 2001 – 2025 across gradients of mean annual rainfall (200 – 500 mm), land ownership, and vegetation types. Fires were highly seasonal, concentrated in the two driest months of the year (September and October). The average fire return period over 25 years was 6.9 years in Etosha National Park, but more than four times greater (31.8 years) on adjacent freehold farms. The proportion of the area burned annually ranged from zero to over 30% and the fire regime was dominated by a few episodic but extreme fire events. Some findings were counter-intuitive in that certain vegetation types in areas of low mean annual rainfall (< 300 mm) burned frequently (fire return period 4.3 years) while others experienced infrequent fires (fire return periods 34 – 206 years) in higher rainfall areas (> 400 mm). Current fire management practices have attempted to reconstruct natural fire regimes and are not based on ecological understanding, and further research, based on monitoring of dynamic interactions between rainfall, fuel accumulation, levels of herbivory and the extent of fires are needed to explain these findings.