The extreme 2017 fire season in Portugal led to widespread recognition of the need for a paradigm shift in forest and wildfire management. We focused our study on Alvares, a parish in central Portugal located in a fire-prone area, which had 60% of its area burned in 2017. We evaluated how different fuel treatment strategies may reduce wildfire hazard in Alvares through (i) a fuel break network with different extents corresponding to different levels of priority and (ii) random fuel treatments resulting from a potential increase in stand-level management intensity. To assess this, we developed a stochastic wildfire simulation system (FUNC-SIM) that integrates uncertainties in fuel distribution over the landscape. If the landscape remains unchanged, Alvares will have large burn probabilities in the north, northeast and center-east areas of the parish that are very often associated with high fireline intensities. The different fuel treatment scenarios decreased burned area between 12.1–31.2%, resulting from 1–4.6% increases in the annual treatment area and reduced the likelihood of wildfires larger than 5000 ha by 10–40%. On average, simulated burned area decreased 0.22% per each ha treated, and cost-effectiveness decreased with increasing area treated. Overall, both fuel treatment strategies effectively reduced wildfire hazard and should be part of a larger, holistic and integrated plan to reduce the vulnerability of the Alvares parish to wildfires.
O fogo constitui um factor ecológico omnipresente no território e na história da gestão dos espaços silvestres em Portugal e é central na formulação das políticas públicas. O artigo aborda 4 temas relevantes para a gestão integrada dos fogos rurais, nomeadamente os regimes do fogo pretéritos e atuais, a evolução da administração pública florestal e das principais linhas de política, o uso do fogo como ferramenta silvícola e o papel dos modelos de intervenção à escala da paisagem na diminuição do risco de incêndio, bem como o seu contributo para o futuro da floresta.
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