FIRELAN—An Ecologically Based Planning Model towards a Fire Resilient and Sustainable Landscape. A Case Study in Center Region of Portugal

Abstract

This paper explores the role of landscape planning as a tool for rural fire prevention. It presents a methodology for a fire resilient and sustainable landscape model (FIRELAN) that articulates the ecological and cultural components in a suitable and multifunction land-use plan. FIRELAN is a conceptual and ecologically based model that recognizes river basin’ land morphology, microclimate and species combustibility as the fundamental factors that determine fire behavior and landscape resilience, along with the ecological network (EN) for achieving ecological sustainability of the landscape. The model is constituted by the FIRELAN Network and the Complementary Areas. This network ensures the effectiveness of discontinuities in the landscape with less combustible land-uses. It also functions as a fire-retardant technique and protection of wildland-urban interface (WUI). This model is applied to municipalities from Portugal’s center region, a simplified landscape severely damaged by recurrent rural fires. The results show that land-use and tree species composition should change drastically, whereas about 72% of the case study needs transformation actions. This requires a significant increase of native or archaeophytes species, agricultural areas, landscape discontinuities and the restoration of biodiversity in Natura 2000 areas. The EN components are 79% of the FIRELAN N area, whose implementation ensures soil and water conservation, biodiversity and habitats. This paper contributes to the discussion of the Portuguese rural fires planning framework.

Promoting Low-Risk Fire Regimes: An Agent-Based Model to Explore Wildfire Mitigation Policy Options

“…Fire 2023, 6,102 As the countryside of southern Europe keeps following a long-term trend of agricultural decline, with farmland being replaced by policy-incentivized forest plantations or abandoned to shrubland, the landscape becomes more homogeneous, more fire-prone, and the fire regimes change to higher risk levels [3,34]. Such evidence supports the calls for public policies better suited to reducing wildfire hazard levels and improving the resilience and sustainability of landscapes, which may include increasing landscape mosaic diversity and promoting LUCs associated with less hazardous fire regimes [5,22,35,36]. This paper addresses these calls by proposing a new framework to assess the cost-effectiveness of public policies aimed at promoting low-risk fire regime landscapes by encouraging landowners to diversify land cover, diverging from the forest stands monoculture.…”

“…Therefore, shrubland can expand more easily over areas that could hardly be used for agriculture, thereby reducing the costs for its expansion. This, however, raises the question of what kind of shrubland should be promoted by such policies when there are already proposals advocating solutions, such as rewilding less favourable areas [54], slow-growing hardwood plantations [22], or setting aside forested land [55,56], to promote the delivery of non-commercial ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, habitat provision for wildlife, or the reduction of wildfire risk [54,57,58].…”

“…Climate, topography, and LUC are acknowledged drivers of fire regimes [18,20]. Among these, LUC stands out as the most relevant for public policies, as climate and topography are naturally less subject to modification by humans on a regional scale [21][22][23][24][25].…”

Transforming Rural Landscape towards Fire Resilience and Landscape Sustainability

“…The proposed landscape planning methodology is based on the landscape transformation model named FIRELAN (Magalhães et al, 2021;Pena et al, 2021) developed in the SCAPEFIRE research project (PCIF/MOS/0046/2017) that includes the present study area as case study), integrates fire resilience, ecological sustainability, economic viability and the simulation of fire behaviour. This paper focuses on fire resilience and ecological sustainability.…”

Effect of phosphorus/nitrogen/carbon component ratio in aqueous flame retardant on the fire prevention of wood substrate

“…Recently, forest fire is a global challenge that has been widely focused by many fire‐prone countries such as USA, Canada, China, Australia, and Russia. According to the previous reports, 1–4 the occurrence of forest fire as well as the combustion products often have destructive influences on the forest ecological environment and cause seriously threats to the animals and human lives 5–7 . Because forest wood is one of the most typical solid fuels, 8,9 it is more necessary to develop an effective wood coating to combat forest fire.…”