Temperature and agriculture are largely associated with fire activity in Central Chile across different temporal periods

Gómez‐González, Susana; González, Mauro E.; Paula, Susana; Díaz-Hormazábal, Ignacio; Lara, Antonio; Delgado‐Baquerizo, Manuel

doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2018.11.041

Cited by 41 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Due to the incentives for the establishment of forest plantations (i.e., the subsidies granted by the law DL 701 and the favourable world market prices), land-use change has systematically diminished diverse habitats from 1975 (Miranda et al 2017). A side effect of this transition from natural forests to plantations was a notably increased wildfire risk due to the high ignitability of some of the plantation species (e.g., Carmona et al 2012;Gómez-González et al 2019). Even though we found the single fire event examined here to play an inferior role in the reduction of current plant species richness compared to the land-use change of the last decades, impacts of the 2017 and future wildfires should not be underrated for several reasons.…”

Section: Loss Of Diverse Habitatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In central Chile, biodiversity hotspots in terms of vascular species richness are connected to old growth native forests, which have not been affected by severe fires or other stand-replacing disturbances for a long time (Braun 2013;Braun et al 2017). Such very low fire frequencies are not representing the current situation in Chile, but it seems likely that the current fire regime (at least in plantation-dominated areas) only exists for a few decades and is a direct result of the land-use change processes, climate change, and a generally increased fire ignition risk due to anthropogenic activities (McWethy et al 2018;Gómez-González et al 2019). Gonzalez et al (2005) indicate an increase in fire occurrence after the Euro-Chilean settlement after 1880, but further research is required.…”

Section: Loss Of Diverse Habitatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Consequences of land-use change and the wildfire disaster of 2017 for the central Chilean biodiversity hotspot

et al. 2021

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Central Chile is an important biodiversity hotspot in Latin America. Biodiversity hotspots are characterised by a high number of endemic species cooccurring with a high level of anthropogenic pressure. In central Chile, the pressure is caused by land-use change, in which near-natural primary and secondary forests are replaced and fragmented by commercial pine and eucalyptus plantations. Large forest fires are another factor that can potentially endanger biodiversity. Usually, environmental hazards, such as wildfires, are part of the regular environmental dynamic and not considered a threat to biodiversity. Nonetheless, this situation may change if land-use change and altered wildfire regimes coerce. Land-use change pressure may destroy landscape integrity in terms of habitat loss and fragmentation, while wildfires may destroy the last remnants of native forests. This study aims to understand the joint effects of land-use change and a catastrophic wildfire on habitat loss and habitat fragmentation of local plant species richness hotspots in central Chile. To achieve this, we apply a combination of ecological fieldwork, remote sensing, and geoprocessing to estimate the spread and spatial patterns of biodiverse habitats under current and past land-use conditions and how these habitats were altered by land-use change and by a single large wildfire event. We show that land-use change has exceeded the wildfire’s impacts on diverse habitats. Despite the fact that the impact of the wildfire was comparably small here, wildfire may coerce with land-use change regarding pressure on biodiversity hotspots. Our findings can be used to develop restoration concepts, targeting on an increase of habitat diversity within currently fire-cleared areas and evaluate their benefits for plant species richness conservation.

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Section: Loss Of Diverse Habitatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Loss Of Diverse Habitatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consequences of land-use change and the wildfire disaster of 2017 for the central Chilean biodiversity hotspot

et al. 2021

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“…This area has a long history of wildfire occurrence [29], explained by climatic conditions, economic activities and population concentration [30]. Said area presents a semiarid Mediterranean climate, with most rainfalls occurring during the winter period, reaching 350-1300 mm per year, causing a long dry season with low relative humidity, high temperatures and very low precipitations [31]. Since 2010, due to global climatic change, this area has been suffering a prolonged and severe mega drought [32].…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Burned Area Classification Based on Extreme Learning Machine and Sentinel-2 Images

et al. 2021

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Sentinel-2 satellite images allow high separability for mapping burned and unburned areas. This problem has been extensively addressed using machine-learning algorithms. However, these need a suitable dataset and entail considerable training time. Recently, extreme learning machines (ELM) have presented high precision in classification and regression problems but with low computational cost. This paper proposes evaluating ELM to map burned areas and compare them with other machine-learning algorithms broadly used. Several indices, metrics and training times were used to assess the performance of the algorithms. Considering the average of datasets, the best performance was obtained by random forest (DICE = 0.93; omission and commission = 0.08) and ELM (DICE = 0.90; omission and commission = 0.07). The training time for the best model was from ELM (1.45 s) and logistic regression (1.85 s). According to results, ELM was the best burned-area classification algorithm, considering precision and training time, evidencing great potential to map burned areas at global scales with medium-high spatial resolution images. This information is essential to fire-risk systems and burned-area records used to design prevention and fire-combat strategies, and it provides valuable knowledge on the effect of fires on the landscape and atmosphere.

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“…This knowledge is of practical importance in firefighting (Vélez, 2009). However, natural factors alone cannot fully explain the extent of forest fires in Chile (Gómez- González et al, 2019). They may explain the size and spread of the flames and therefore the damage dimension of the risk.…”

Section: Complexity Ambiguity Uncertainty? Forest Fire Risks In Chilementioning

confidence: 99%

The (De-)Contextualization of Geographical Knowledge in Forest Fire Risk Management in Chile as a Challenge for Governance

Handke

2020

Knowledge for Governance

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Chilean society is confronted with increasing risk from wildfires. Individual rather than collective risk management solutions predominate. Large forest companies, for example, reduce the probability of wildfires affecting their tree plantations with hierarchically-ordered management routines. Additionally, they purchase insurance policies to protect themselves from economic losses. Other stakeholders in the Chilean forest regions, however, do not have the same access to these forms of risk management due to the high degree of technical knowledge and organizational competences required. In his contribution, Michael Handke assesses the strengths and weaknesses of interacting hierarchical and market forms of risk management and calls for a deeper geographical approach to risk governance. He reveals that detailed geographical knowledge of wildfires is explicitly decontextualized and even ignored in current risk management practices. As a result, essential knowledge about the causes and effects of arson, which seem to be on the rise in Chile, is lost.

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Temperature and agriculture are largely associated with fire activity in Central Chile across different temporal periods

Cited by 41 publications

References 38 publications

Consequences of land-use change and the wildfire disaster of 2017 for the central Chilean biodiversity hotspot

Consequences of land-use change and the wildfire disaster of 2017 for the central Chilean biodiversity hotspot

Burned Area Classification Based on Extreme Learning Machine and Sentinel-2 Images

The (De-)Contextualization of Geographical Knowledge in Forest Fire Risk Management in Chile as a Challenge for Governance

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