Abstract
In recent years, Austria has experienced highly variable forest fire activity with new record values regarding the number of fires and sizes of burned areas. Single seasons in 2011, 2012 and 2013 showed 20-year-peaks and significant differences regarding fire activity. A statistical overview of datasets from Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia is given, allowing a preliminary comparison between the Alpine countries. Higher temperatures in combination with local dry weather conditions are hypothesized as reasons for the observed anomalies. Further analysis will be done with new climatic data in high spatial resolution from the “AgroDroughtAustria” project to confirm these preliminary findings.
Highlights
Austria is an Alpine Central European country with a forest cover of 47% mainly dominated by coniferous tree species
Regional climate models suggest an increase in temperature and a reduction of precipitation in summer and autumn, especially in the south and east of Austria, which would likely lead to more frequent forest fires [8,9,10,11]
Several authors have identified large and extraordinary forest fires events in the Alpine region in recent years, often associated with heat waves and dry foehn winds, which is generally seen as an indication of a changing climate that may lead to new fire regimes in the Alps [23,47,48,49,50]
Summary
Austria is an Alpine Central European country with a forest cover of 47% mainly dominated by coniferous tree species. Forest fires in Austria play no major role compared to the damages and costs by other natural disturbances (e.g., storm, bark beetles) They are likely to become more important as expected impacts of climate change, socioeconomic changes and general trends in the provision of Forests 2015, 6 ecosystem services are supposed to evolve [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. In 2013 a forest fire database and public accessible Web-GIS were developed to standardize the acquisition of forest fire data and to improve the access to recent findings [17] In this short communication we want to present preliminary findings regarding the exceptional occurrence of forest fires in Austria and neighboring countries in recent years. We want to report an observation from the real world of fires to provide some words of caution
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