Decreasing Fires in Mediterranean Europe

Abstract

Forest fires are a serious environmental hazard in southern Europe. Quantitative assessment of recent trends in fire statistics is important for assessing the possible shifts induced by climate and other environmental/socioeconomic changes in this area. Here we analyse recent fire trends in Portugal, Spain, southern France, Italy and Greece, building on a homogenized fire database integrating official fire statistics provided by several national/EU agencies. During the period 1985-2011, the total annual burned area (BA) displayed a general decreasing trend, with the exception of Portugal, where a heterogeneous signal was found. Considering all countries globally, we found that BA decreased by about 3020 km2 over the 27-year-long study period (i.e. about -66% of the mean historical value). These results are consistent with those obtained on longer time scales when data were available, also yielding predominantly negative trends in Spain and France (1974-2011) and a mixed trend in Portugal (1980-2011). Similar overall results were found for the annual number of fires (NF), which globally decreased by about 12600 in the study period (about -59%), except for Spain where, excluding the provinces along the Mediterranean coast, an upward trend was found for the longer period. We argue that the negative trends can be explained, at least in part, by an increased effort in fire management and prevention after the big fires of the 1980’s, while positive trends may be related to recent socioeconomic transformations leading to more hazardous landscape configurations, as well as to the observed warming of recent decades. We stress the importance of fire data homogenization prior to analysis, in order to alleviate spurious effects associated with non-stationarities in the data due to temporal variations in fire detection efforts.

Exploring spatial–temporal dynamics of fire regime features in mainland Spain

“…In the case of the Hinterland region, the trend in the number of fires suggests a higher frequency in winter. This behaviour was also found by Zavala et al (2011) andTurco et al (2016). The latter found an apparent shift in the mid-1980s, the same as we detected.…”

“…However, the burned area shows a decrease in all regions and seasons. Previous studies by Rodrigues et al (2013), Spano et al (2014) and Turco et al (2016) have also found negative trends for a very similar time span. These works sug- Figure 5.…”

“…Fire itself is a very dynamic landscape process, which depends on different factors, such as weather, vegetation type and structure, fuel moisture, land use and human activity (Falk et al, 2011). Understanding wildfire phenomenon is still a challenging task, especially when facing climate and/or socioeconomic changes (Pausas and Keeley, 2009) as is the case of Spain (Pausas, 2004;Pausas and Fernández-Muñoz, 2012;Turco et al, 2014) and other EUMed regions (Moriondo et al, 2006;Salis et al, 2014;. In this context, fire regime characterization may contribute to improving our knowledge on how wildfires generally behave.…”

“…homogenous areas with similar fire regime characteristics). From a temporal perspective, previous studies reported the existence of temporal changes or trends in the evolution of several fire regime features (Flannigan et al, 2009;Rodrigues et al, 2013;Turco et al, 2016). However, despite there being evidence of temporal variability in fire regime features, it is not usually considered when defining, characterizing or outlining fire regimes.…”

Global assessment of rural–urban interface in Portugal related to land cover changes

“…Indeed, results of several recent studies suggest a significant increase in the burnt area, not only in Portugal (Pereira et al, 2013) but also in the entire Iberian Peninsula (Sousa et al, 2015), for different scenarios of future climate and LULCC (Amato et al, 2018). These findings are in line with the fact that Portugal is the only European country where burnt area has not decreased in the last decades (Turco et al, 2016) and with the increase in the future fire danger for the Mediterranean Basin countries of Europe and north Africa (Bedia et al, 2014). In addition, burnt area in Portugal and in the Mediterranean Basin is clearly associated with extreme weather and climate variability, namely the occurrence of heat waves and drought (Amraoui et al, 2015;Pereira et al, 2005;Telesca and Pereira, 2010;Trigo et al, 2006Trigo et al, , 2016.…”