Role of land‐cover and WUI types on spatio‐temporal dynamics of fires in the French Mediterranean area

Abstract

This work aims at assessing, in the French Mediterranean area, the spatio-temporal trends of fires, including their causes, at fine scale (communities), comparing different periods between 1993 and 2017. These trends were compared to those of land-cover and wildland-urban interface (WUI) which were coupled with a spatial analysis of the ignitions in order to highlight the main drivers and preferential areas. Fire density was highly variable among communities, hotspots being located mostly close to big cities but spatially varying in time in contrast to fire occurrence and burned area. A decrease in the unknown cause proportion and a variation of the cause frequency were highlighted among periods, criminal fires being the most frequent and deleterious, especially before 2009, as well as those due to negligence during private activities, mostly after 2009. Land cover classes significantly varied among periods, artificialized and natural areas presenting a reversed trend compared with agricultural areas. Natural areas were the most affected by ignitions (60%), regardless of the period; this trend is slowly decreasing. WUI represented ∼30% of the study area, the different types varying spatially (denser clustered types mostly located in the South-East) and showed an increase over time, especially for both clustered types but with high variability among communities. Half of the ignitions occurred in WUI, with "very dense clustered" and "scattered" types being the most affected, especially in 2009. Better understanding the spatio-temporal evolution of fires and of their causes should allow refining the fire policies in terms of awareness raising, firefighting means, and land management.

Modeling and Mapping of Forest Fire Occurrence in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship of Poland Based on Machine Learning Methods

“…Anthropogenic features, such as distance to agricultural land (DisAgL), were the second most important contributing variable in the GBM model, but they were the most important according to the RF model. Such a high ranking for this variable in both models is consistent with the findings of a previous study [45] that highlighted the wildland-urban interface as the main driving factor for forest fire ignition [75][76][77]. The importance given by the GBM model to other anthropogenic features, such as distances to buildings, roads, and railways, confirmed the role of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) in forest fire ignition.…”

Burn Severity Drivers in Italian Large Wildfires

“…The final goal is to reduce the devastating effects of large forest fires on human lives, infrastructures and environmental resources. This is especially true in Mediterranean countries, where the expansion of wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) [101] and the related increasing likelihood of dangerous fire events within their boundaries is raising concern among policymakers, land managers and the scientific community for their direct ecological and socio-ecological implications.…”

Drivers and Trends in the Size and Severity of Forest Fires Endangering WUI Areas: A Regional Case Study

“…The interannual variability in fire weather conditions may also be responsible for the lack of correlation between the temporal trend of FWI and burned area, e.g., the burned area of a forest fire under extreme FWI conditions may exceed the burned area of the remaining forest fires in the same year occurring under relatively low FWI conditions. Nonetheless, future research should not only consider longer time series, but also the temporal evolution of fire regime attributes at finer spatial scales since WUI vulnerability to fire is expected to vary spatially among major WUI types (e.g., scattered or clustered) [120].…”