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Título
Characterization of biophysical contexts leading to severe wildfires in Portugal and their environmental controls
Autor
Facultad/Centro
Área de conocimiento
Título de la revista
Science of The Total Environment
Cita Bibliográfica
Fernández-Guisuraga, Martins, S., and Fernandes, P. M. (2023). Characterization of biophysical contexts leading to severe wildfires in Portugal and their environmental controls. The Science of the Total Environment, 875, Article e162575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162575
Editorial
Elsevier
Fecha
2023
ISSN
0048-9697
Resumen
[EN] Characterizing the fire regime in regions prone to extreme wildfire behavior is essential for providing comprehensive insights on potential ecosystem response to fire disturbance in the context of global change. We aimed to disentangle the linkage between contemporary damage-related attributes of wildfires as shaped by the environmental controls of fire behavior across mainland Portugal. We selected large wildfires (≥100 ha, n = 292) that occurred during the 2015–2018 period, covering the full spectrum of large fire-size variation. Ward's hierarchical clustering on principal components was used to identify homogeneous wildfire contexts at landscape scale on the basis of fire size, proportion of high fire severity, and fire severity variability, and their bottom-up (pre-fire fuel type fraction, topography) and top-down (fire weather) controls. Piecewise Structural Equation Modeling was used to disentangle the direct and indirect relationships between fire characteristics and fire behavior drivers. Cluster analysis evidenced severe and large wildfires in the central region of Portugal displaying consistent fire severity patterns. Thus, we found a positive relationship between fire size and proportion of high fire severity, which was mediated by distinct fire behavior drivers involving direct and indirect pathways. A high fraction of conifer forest within wildfire perimeters and extreme fire weather were primarily responsible for those interactions. In the context of global change, our results suggest that pre-fire fuel management should be targeted at expanding the fire weather settings in which fire control is feasible and promote less flammable and more resilient forest types.
Materia
Palabras clave
Peer review
SI
ID proyecto
- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology/UIDB/04033/2020
URI
DOI
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