The role of short-term weather conditions in temporal dynamics of fire regime features in mainland Spain

Jiménez-Ruano, Adrián; Mimbrero, Marcos Rodrigues; Jolly, W. Matt; Fernández, Juan Ramón de la Riva

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.09.107

Cited by 25 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…The Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System (CFFWIS) (van Wagner and Pickett, 1985;Van Wagner, 1987), has been used to model current and future fire activity, as well as to help forest and fire managers as well as national authorities in prevention and suppression activities all over the world (Li et al, 2008;Wotton, 2009;Flannigan et al, 2013Flannigan et al, , 2016 and, especially, in the Mediterranean (Amatulli et al, 2013;Pereira et al, 2013;Bedia et al, 2014). More recently, Jimenez-Ruano et al (2018) studied several fire weather danger rating indices, including the Fire Weather Index (FWI), concluding that these indices could provide useful information about upcoming fire activity up to two months ahead of time, and that they could explain seasonal variability but not necessarily ongoing trends. On the other hand, Pérez-Sánchez et al (2017) showed that the FWI is the most suitable index for semiarid regions, such as SE Iberia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different methods have been developed, tested and used to detect clustering patterns in fire incidence (Pereira et al, 2015;Tonini et al, 2016;Kanevski and Pereira, 2017). Several studies developed zoning approaches with the purpose of identifying regions with similar fire regime, using different fire data analysis, such as burnt area tendency (Silva et al, 2019), intraannual pattern of burnt area (Sousa et al, 2015;Trigo et al, 2016), fire activity and fire weather risk (Jimenez-Ruano et al, 2018) or other variables that affect fire (Moreno and Chuvieco, 2013). These studies show that the analysis of existing burnt area and meteorological data for the last few decades can help to detect the impacts of recent climate changes on fire weather danger and risk and, perhaps more importantly, on fire regimes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Recent evolution of spatial and temporal patterns of burnt areas and fire weather risk in the Iberian Peninsula

Calheiros

Nunes

Pereira

2020

Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

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The weather is an important driver of the wildfire incidence because it strongly influences fuel availability and flammability. In the Mediterranean climate, the spatial and temporal patterns of fire weather present high variability, which help to understand the variable fire regimes. To assess this link in the Iberian Peninsula and the role of fire weather on fire incidence variability, this work identified pyro-regions, characterized the fire regimes in these regions and compared them with the spatial and seasonal distribution of several components of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI) System. A cluster analysis was performed on monthly normalized burnt area (NBA) series for the 1980 -2015 period in each administrative division of the Iberian Peninsula (Portuguese districts and Spanish provinces), which revealed four pyro-regions (Northwest, North, Southwest and East) as well as significant spatial and temporal variability of NBA patterns. A separate analysis for 1980 -1997 and 1998 -2015 revealed noteworthy changes in the border of pyro-regions caused by changes in NBA seasonal patterns in some administrative regions. The analysis of the fire weather risk distribution for 1980 -2017 included the assessment of extreme fire weather days, defined as days with Daily Severity Rating (DSR) above the 95 th percentile, for the summer fire season, and as days with Drought Code above the 95 th percentile, for the winter-spring fire season. The distribution of the monthly extreme fire weather days is highly correlated with the NBA seasonal variability and explains the differences between seasonal wildfire characteristics and the recent changes in the border administrative regions. The analysis of the fire weather patterns for large wildfires disclosed that these events were linked with extreme DSR days, especially in the NW pyro-region. These findings highlight the strong link between climate variability and fire regimes in the Iberian Peninsula, and can therefore help assess the impacts of climate change and to project future burnt area patterns.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent evolution of spatial and temporal patterns of burnt areas and fire weather risk in the Iberian Peninsula

Calheiros

Nunes

Pereira

2020

Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

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“…Fire occurrence is generally low in alpine ecosystems under present climatic conditions and land use patterns in the Pyrenees. However, fire activity has changed over time (Jiménez-Ruano et al, 2019) and may have been a more frequent disturbance over the last millennia, with different climatic settings and more intense human activities. In fact, human activities have been modifying natural fire regimes through changing land use (Pausas and Keeley, 2014) since centuries or even millennia (Carracedo et al, 2017;Morales-Molino et al, 2017), using fire as a tool in land management.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Holocene fire and vegetation dynamics in the Central Pyrenees (Spain)

Leunda

Gil‐Romera

Daniau

et al. 2020

CATENA

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Fire-vegetation relationships are critical to understand transient mountain ecosystems and their long-term landscape dynamics, which is essential for alpine forest conservation. In this paper we aim to 1) reconstruct the Holocene fire history at high altitudes of the southern Central Pyrenees, 2) add evidence to the debate on fire origin, naturally or anthropogenically produced, 3) determine the importance of fire as a disturbance agent for sub-alpine and alpine vegetation, in comparison with the plant community internal dynamics applying conditional

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“…Consequently, outputs of fire weather systems benefit from regional interpretation and statistical evaluation against historical fire activity that lead to probabilistic assessments of fire likelihood and threshold values to define fire danger classes [5,11]. In Europe, the CFFWIS has been calibrated to depict distinct fire activity levels [12][13][14][15] and has been used to model fire activity (number of fires, burned area) across various spatiotemporal scales [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] and to assess the likelihood and characteristics of large fires [24][25][26][27][28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variation in the Canadian Fire Weather Index Thresholds for Increasingly Larger Fires in Portugal

Fernandes

2019

Forests

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Forest fire management relies on the fire danger rating to optimize its suite of activities. Limiting fire size is the fire management target whenever minimizing burned area is the primary goal, such as in the Mediterranean Basin. Within the region, wildfire incidence is especially acute in Portugal, a country where fire-influencing anthropogenic and landscape features vary markedly within a relatively small area. This study establishes daily fire weather thresholds associated to transitions to increasingly larger fires for individual Portuguese regions (2001–2011 period), using the national wildfire and Canadian fire weather index (FWI) databases and logistic regression. FWI thresholds variation in relation to population density, topography, land cover, and net primary production (NPP) metrics is examined through regression and cluster analysis. Larger fires occur under increasingly higher fire danger. Resistance to fire spread (the fire-size FWI thresholds) varies regionally following biophysical gradients, and decreases under more complex topography and when NPP and occupation by flammable forest or by shrubland increase. Three main clusters synthesize these relationships and roughly coincide with the western north-central, eastern north-central and southern parts of the country. Quantification of fire-weather relationships can be improved through additional variables and analysis at other spatial scales.

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The role of short-term weather conditions in temporal dynamics of fire regime features in mainland Spain

Cited by 25 publications

References 61 publications

Recent evolution of spatial and temporal patterns of burnt areas and fire weather risk in the Iberian Peninsula

Recent evolution of spatial and temporal patterns of burnt areas and fire weather risk in the Iberian Peninsula

Holocene fire and vegetation dynamics in the Central Pyrenees (Spain)

Variation in the Canadian Fire Weather Index Thresholds for Increasingly Larger Fires in Portugal

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