Impact of Environmental and Human Factors on Rural Fire Occurrence

Abstract

Understanding the influence of environmental factors and human activities on fire occurrence in rural areas is of considerable interest in order to facilitate effective prevention strategies. The newly named Natural Area of Sierra Nevada (both a National and Natural Park) is one of the larger areas of environmental and tourism interest in Spain and includes, among other areas, much of Granada Alpujarra and Almería Alpujarra and the outskirts of the principal ski resort. These areas receive each year thousands of visitors of different kinds (sports, cultural, etc.) which, together with other factors, clearly influence the impact and the possibility of fire occurrence. This paper presents a selection of the factors which have the greatest influence on the probability of a fire occurrence and uses a multivariate statistical technique that considers as influential variables several selected factors of environmental type, factors of human type, factors of land holdings type, etc.

Air Quality Analysis in the European Union

“…In the present paper, we analyze the spatial behaviour of the levels of emissions within the European Union, using a geographic information system [9], as has been done in earlier studies involving different spatial areas, usually in urban or metropolitan areas [10][11]. An important consideration is that the great size of the study areathe entire EU -complicates both data collection and the management of the variables to be analyzed.…”