Search results for "forest fire"
showing 10 items of 14 documents
Forest fires in the Portuguese northwest
2011
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
‘Back to the Future’—Oak wood-pasture for wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean
2021
In the summer of 2021, enormous wildfires in the Mediterranean eliminated huge areas of mainly coniferous forest, destroyed adjacent settlements and claimed the lives of many people. The fires indicate effects of climate change and expose consequences of rural demographic changes, deficits in regional and touristic development planning and shortcomings in forest policy. This forum article highlights the dimensions of the problem, calls for a paradigm shift and shows solutions. Land abandonment, woody plant encroachment and non-reflective afforestation are leading to increasing amounts of combustible biomass. To prevent disastrous fires in future, fundamental changes in tree species composit…
Hybrid inversion of radiative transfer models based on high spatial resolution satellite reflectance data improves fractional vegetation cover retrie…
2021
In forest landscapes affected by fire, the estimation of fractional vegetation cover (FVC) from remote sensing data using radiative transfer models (RTMs) enables to evaluate the ecological impact of such disturbance across plant communities at different spatio-temporal scales. Even though, when landscapes are highly heterogeneous, the fine-scale ground spatial variation might not be properly captured if FVC products are provided at moderate or coarse spatial scales, as typical of most of operational Earth observing satellite missions. The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of a RTM inversion approach for estimating FVC from satellite reflectance data at high spatial reso…
Early post-fire bird community in European boreal forest: Comparing salvage-logged with non-intervention areas
2019
Salvage logging after disturbances in forests substantially modifies vegetation structureand dead wood availability, but empirical evidence on its impact on biodiversity, especiallyin European boreal forest, is sparse. In this study we investigated the short-term effect ofpost-fire salvage logging on species richness and abundance of birds in recently burnedmixed coniferous forest. Using point counts we estimated local species composition at 49salvaged sites and 55 non-intervention sites (burnt forest left for natural regeneration) thatwere not logged after afire in south-central Sweden. Local species richness, abundanceand Simpson's species diversity index were significantly higher at non-…
Impact of Land Cover Change Induced by a Fire Event on the Surface Energy Fluxes Derived from Remote Sensing
2015
Forest fires affect the natural cycle of the vegetation, and the structure and functioning of ecosystems. As a consequence of defoliation and vegetation mortality, surface energy flux patterns can suffer variations. Remote sensing techniques together with surface energy balance modeling offer the opportunity to explore these changes. In this paper we focus on a Mediterranean forest ecosystem. A fire event occurred in 2001 in Almodovar del Pinar (Spain) affecting a pine and shrub area. A two-source energy balance approach was applied to a set of Landsat 5-TM and Landsat 7-EMT+ images to estimate the surface fluxes in the area. Three post-fire periods were analyzed, six, seven, nine, and 11 y…
Development of a Model to Estimate the Risk of Emission of Greenhouse Gases from Forest Fires
2022
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Persistence of remnant boreal plants in the Chiricahua Mountains, southern Arizona
2020
Abstract Boreal plants growing along the southern edge of their range on isolated mountains in a hot desert matrix live near the extreme of their physiological tolerance. Such plants are considered sensitive to small changes in climate. We coupled field observations (1974, 1993, 2019) about the abundance and vigor of small populations of ten remnant boreal plant species persisting in the uppermost elevations of spruce-fir forests of the Chiricahua Mountains, together with modeling of the species sensitivities to three stress factors associated with climatic change: warming, drought, and forest fire, in order to explore the persistence of frontier boreal plant species during climate change. …
Multiscale variation in drought controlled historical forest fire activity in the boreal forests of eastern Fennoscandia
2017
Forest fires are a key disturbance in boreal forests, and characteristics of fire regimes are among the most important factors explaining the variation in forest structure and species composition. The occurrence of fire is connected with climate, but earlier, mostly local-scale studies in the northern European boreal forests have provided little insight into fire-climate relationship before the modern fire suppression period. Here, we compiled annually resolved fire history, temperature, and precipitation reconstructions from eastern Fennoscandia from the mid-16th century to the end of the 19th century, a period of strong human influence on fires. We used synchrony of fires over the network…
Soil and organic carbon redistribution in a recently burned Mediterranean hillslope affected by water erosion processes
2022
Forest fires cause many changes in the physical, chemical and biological soil properties such as aggregation and soil organic carbon contents (SOC) as well as on soil hydrology and erosion processes. Most studies on post-fire soil erosion in Mediterranean environments have been plot-based and research at hillslope or broader scale is scarce. Understanding SOC nature, distribution and modifications, as produced by forest fires and erosion, has become crucial to model and define the role of soil erosion as source or sink of C, and to sustainably manage ecosystem services related to the soil resource. This research provides data about the loss and redistribution of soil and SOC in a Mediterran…
Emerging contaminants related to the occurrence of forest fires in the Spanish Mediterranean
2017
Forest fires can be a source of contamination because, among others, of the use of chemicals to their extinction (flame retardants, FRs), or by the production of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) derived from high temperature alteration of organic matter. Up to our knowledge, this study is the first to assess the direct (PAHs 16 on the USA EPA's priority list), and indirect [tri- to hepta- brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), organophosphorus flame retardants (PFRs) and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs)] contamination related to forest fires. The abundance and distribution of these contaminants were monitored on two Mediterranean hillslopes, one burned and one unburned, near Azuébar (S…