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Título
Drivers and trends in the size and severity of forest fires endangering WUI areas: a regional case study
Autor
Facultad/Centro
Área de conocimiento
Título de la revista
Forests
Número de la revista
12
Datos de la obra
Rodriguez-Jimenez, F., Fernandes, P. M., Fernández-Guisuraga, J. M., Alvarez, X. & Lorenzo, H. (2023). Drivers and trends in the size and severity of forest fires endangering WUI areas: a regional case study. Forests, 14(12), Article e2366. https://doi.org/10.3390/F14122366
Editor
MDPI
Fecha
2023
Abstract
[EN] This study explored, for the first time, the drivers shaping large fire size and high severity of forest fires classified as level-2 in Spain, which pose a great danger to the wildland–urban interface. Specifically, we examined how bottom-up (fuel type and topography) and top-down (fire weather) controls shaped level-2 fire behavior through a Random Forest classifier at the regional scale in Galicia (NW Spain). We selected for this purpose 93 level-2 forest fires. The accuracy of the RF fire size and severity classifications was remarkably high (>80%). Fire weather overwhelmed bottom-up controls in controlling the fire size of level-2 forest fires. The likelihood of large level-2 forest fires increased sharply with the fire weather index, but plateaued at values above 40. Fire size strongly responded to minimum relative humidity at values below 30%. The most important variables explaining fire severity in level-2 forest fires were the same as in the fire size, as well as the pre-fire shrubland fraction. The high-fire-severity likelihood of level-2 forest fires increased exponentially for shrubland fractions in the landscape above 50%. Our results suggest that level-2 forest fires will pose an increasing danger to people and their property under predicted scenarios of extreme weather conditions
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Palabras clave
Peer review
SI
ID proyecto
- info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/AEI/Programa Estatal de I+D+i Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad/PCI2020-120705-2/ES/4Map4Health: Mapping on forest health,species and forest fire risks using novel ict data and approaches/CHIST-ERA
- info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology//UIDB/04033/2020/PT
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