Driving factors of fire density can spatially vary at the local scale in south-eastern France

Ganteaume, Anne; Long-Fournel, M.

doi:10.1071/wf13209

Cited by 26 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Our findings, documented on a large (national) scale, are in line with previous local studies affirming that as the distance to roads, urban settlements, and built-up areas increases, fire occurrence decreases (e.g., [36,41,42,[45][46][47][48][50][51][52][53]55,56,76]), and fire incidence increases (e.g., [54,77]). In the examined case, nearly 50% of fire occurrence and 36% of recurrent fires occurred within 200 m from built-up areas.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Are Wildfires Knocking on the Built-Up Areas Door?

Mancini

Elia

Barbati

et al. 2018

Forests

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Human-started fires represent the vast majority of wildfires in Mediterranean countries. The current expansion of human settlements into fire-prone territories has led to the creation of landscapes where anthropogenic developments merge with wildland areas. In this context, understanding the role of distance from built-up areas in shaping coarse-scale wildfire spatial patterns is a major concern. Proximity to cities has become an important factor that may increase the probability of wildfires in wildland-urban interfaces. To this issue, we developed an assessment of wildfire distribution in Italy over an 8-year period (2007-2014) to quantify fire occurrence and recurrence as a function of distance from built-up areas. Our findings suggest a positive relationship between the distance from built-up areas and fire incidence (i.e., ratio between burnt forest area and total forest area), whereas a negative relation was found between distance from built-up areas and fire frequency and recurrence; thus, there are more recurring yet smaller sized-fires near built-up areas. Fifty percent of fire events and more than two-thirds of recurrent fires occur within 200 m from built-up areas. On the other hand, the considerable amount of such fire events never reaches an incidence higher than 10% in flat areas and 30% in hilly and mountainous areas. More broadly, quantitative knowledge about where fires occur is essential to ensure appropriate fire management throughout large territories. With this in mind, our investigation intends to provide a solid base for further studies in landscapes with a high component of human-dominated land use.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Are Wildfires Knocking on the Built-Up Areas Door?

Mancini

Elia

Barbati

et al. 2018

Forests

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“…Topographic factors have an indirect impact on the occurrence and spread of wildfires by affecting microclimates in local areas. Studies have shown that the topography has a certain impact on the occurrence of wildfires, and wildfires occur more frequently especially in arid sunny slopes, on ridges and in low altitude areas [37]. In this paper, the elevation has a greater impact than do the slope or aspect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Wildfires on the Mongolian Plateau: Identifying Drivers and Spatial Distributions to Predict Wildfire Probability

et al. 2019

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With climate change, significant fluctuations in wildfires have been observed on the Mongolian Plateau. The ability to predict the distribution of wildfires in the context of climate change plays a critical role in wildfire management and ecosystem maintenance. In this paper, Ripley’s K function and a Random Forest (RF) model were applied to analyse the spatial patterns and main influencing factors affecting the occurrence of wildfire on the Mongolian Plateau. The results showed that the wildfires were mainly clustered in space due to the combination of influencing factors. The distance scale is less than 1/2 of the length of the Mongolian Plateau; that is, it does not experience boundary effects in the study area and it meets the requirements of Ripley’s K function. Among the driving factors, the fraction of vegetation coverage (FVC), land use degree (La), elevation, precipitation (pre), wet day frequency (wet), and maximum temperature (tmx) had the greatest influences, while the aspect had the lowest influence. The likelihood of fire was mainly concentrated in the northern, eastern, and southern parts of the Mongolian Plateau and in the border area between the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (Inner Mongolia) and Mongolian People’s Republic (Mongolia), and wildfires did not occur or occurred less frequently in the hinterland area. The fitting results of the RF model showed a prediction accuracy exceeding 90%, which indicates that the model has a high ability to predict wildfire occurrences on the Mongolian Plateau. This study can provide a reference for predictions and decision-making related to wildfires on the Mongolian Plateau.

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“…The study area (total surface area of 11 157 km 2 ) is one of the most fire-prone regions of southeastern France in terms of fire frequency (i.e., number of fires) and burned area (Ganteaume and Jappiot, 2013; Ganteaume and Guerra, 2018). The western part is characterized by an extensive WUI where the ignitions are the most frequent (47 % of the total ignitions occurred in the WUI) (Ganteaume and Long-Fournel, 2015). Most large fires occur in summer but their cause is often unknown and when it is known, these large fires are mainly due to arson (Ganteaume and Guerra, 2018).…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrasting large fire activity in the French Mediterranean

Ganteaume

Barbero

2019

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. In the French Mediterranean, large fires have significant socioeconomic and environmental impacts. We used a long-term georeferenced fire time series (1958–2017) to analyze both spatial and temporal distributions of large fires (LFs; ≥100 ha). The region was impacted in some locations up to six times by recurrent LFs and 21 % of the total area burned by LFs occurred on a surface that previously burned in the past, with potential impact on forest resilience. We found contrasting patterns between the east and the west of the study area, the former experiencing fewer LFs but of a larger extent compared to the latter, with an average time of occurrence between LFs exceeding 4000 ha < 7 years mostly in the eastern coastal area and > 50 years in the west. This longitudinal gradient in LF return level contrasts with what we would expect from mean fire weather conditions strongly decreasing eastwards during the fire season but is consistent with larger fuel cover in the east, highlighting the strong role of fuel continuity in fire spread. Additionally, our analysis confirms the sharp decrease in both LF frequency and burned area in the early 1990s, due to the efficiency of fire suppression and prevention reinforced at that time, thereby weakening the functional climate–fire relationship across the region.

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Driving factors of fire density can spatially vary at the local scale in south-eastern France

Cited by 26 publications

References 49 publications

Are Wildfires Knocking on the Built-Up Areas Door?

Are Wildfires Knocking on the Built-Up Areas Door?

Wildfires on the Mongolian Plateau: Identifying Drivers and Spatial Distributions to Predict Wildfire Probability

Contrasting large fire activity in the French Mediterranean

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