  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.
