Regional fire scenarios in Spain: Linking landscape dynamics and fire regime for wildfire risk management

Half-Century Changes in LULC and Fire in Two Iberian Inner Mountain Areas

“…Despite not addressing climate, which likely influenced both fire and LULC, this recent historical perspective and comparative case study approach was useful for making inferences about fire and landscape change based on empirical, descriptive data and therefore elucidating complex relationships [126]. We cannot attribute cause and effect based on this descriptive and empirical analysis, but the similarities within these case studies and broader regional and national studies lends credibility to our conclusions (e.g., [13,27]). Unfortunately, we cannot further investigate the current forest composition dynamics, because the latest NFI data have not been updated recently.…”

“…4000-2000 yr. BP) decreased with the intensification of human activities [24,25], and that the Spanish Forest Administration carried out several reforestations over the 20th century for hydrological-woodland restoration and erosion control in the upper parts of the watersheds [26]. Fire in the Ayllón massif is characterized by very few ignitions and large burned areas [27]. However, the Estrela massif has a much higher fire frequency than the Ayllón massif from the late 20th century.…”

Have Historical Land Use/Land Cover Changes Triggered a Fire Regime Shift in Central Spain?

“…This socioeconomic crisis entailed rural exodus and loss of rural culture, land abandonment and uncontrolled biomass accumulation. Therefore, the fire regime change was mainly related to fire propagation with an abrupt increase in burned area which evolved through the fire generations model [5,8,52] to the generalization of large fires in the 90s and finally to the current megafires.…”

“…They are located in five different Spanish provinces (Cáceres, Salamanca, Ávila, Segovia and Guadalajara) that are also part of three different political regions (Extremadura, Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha). The six case studies are representative of the biophysical and landscape diversity of the Central Mountain System, which has been historically one of the areas most affected by wildfires in the Iberian Peninsula [8]. Actually, the six case studies have been selected in order to assess the firelandscape interaction in different ecological and social contexts.…”

“…One of the reasons is that research on the effect of social-ecological contextual factors on fire regime change requires a long-term and local scale approach. That means that a strong data limitation constraint has to be dealt with, and that it is difficult to make generalizations based on the modeling of the site-specific results obtained [7][8][9].…”