Fire occurrence zoning from local to global scale in the European Mediterranean basin: implications for multi-scale fire management and policy

Abstract

This study proposes and evaluates a relatively new concept for fire occurrence zoning based on documented historical fire records. The proposed method creates continuous kernel density surfaces based on wildland fire ignition observations. Kernels have the advantage of directly producing density estimates that are not influenced by grid size or localization effects. Within this scheme, kernel density surfaces have been created and reclassified to construct fire occurrence zones at local to global scales in the Mediterranean Basin. Specifically, fire occurrence zones were created for the European scale (European Mediterranean Basin), national scale (Greece), regional scale (Peloponnese, Greece) and local scale (Chalkidiki, Greece). To evaluate fire occurrence zones, we compared the observed with the expected distribution of the number of fires within these zones using a Monte Carlo randomization test, finding that these numbers were statistically different in all cases. The deviations observed from the expected distributions towards the high occurrence zone indicated their successful assessment and value. In this paper, we further discuss their potential role and use for multi-scale fire management and policy in a European context.

Mapping Forest Fire Risk at a Local Scale—A Case Study in Andalusia (Spain)

“…From a geographic point of view, global wildfires studies are usually linked to long-term approaches and are mainly focused on world fire regimes identification or on the assessment of climate change influence over these regimes [23,24]. In the same way, regional risk mapping includes a wide range of spatial scenarios-several hundred thousand to millions of square kilometers [25]; they might include international [26,27], national [28] or subnational approaches [29], and they are suitable for national and regional orientation of environmental and forest polices and legislation. Local risk mapping [30,31] refers to extensions below those aforementioned and obtained maps are especially suitable to be 3 of 22 included in land management, wildfire risk information and communication, and emergency planning at the municipal or local community level [32][33][34][35].…”

Analysis of recent spatial–temporal evolution of human driving factors of wildfires in Spain

“…However, it is clear that human-caused fires that occur repeatedly in a given geographical area are not simply reducible to individual personal factors, and thus subject to pure chance. They are usually the result of a spatial pattern, whose origin is in the interaction of environmental and socioeconomic conditions (Koutsias et al 2016). This is particularly true in humandominated landscapes such as Spain, where anthropogenic ignitions surpass natural ignitions, and humans interact to a large degree with the landscape, changing its flammability, and act as fire initiators or suppressors.…”

Predicting the occurrence of wildfires with binary structured additive regression models

“…For over 40 years, researchers and forest services offices have been developing models that would be capable of predicting fire occurrence zones (Koutsias et al 2015;Martínez-Fernández et al 2013;Koutsias et al 2010). This process has faced two major difficulties relating, firstly, to the randomness of the phenomenon, especially in the case of arson, and secondly, to the availability of statistics and computer tools that would enable accurate models to be developed for a given spatial and temporal context.…”