Are Wildfires Knocking on the Built-Up Areas Door?

Leone Mancini,Luca Salvati,Piermaria Corona,Anna Barbati,Giovanni Sanesi,Mario Elia,Raffaele Lafortezza

doi:10.3390/f9050234

Leone Mancini, Luca Salvati + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/f9050234

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Abstract

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.

Highlights

Forest fire is an ecological factor in the Mediterranean region that often determines a wide range of impacts on ecosystem services [1]
On other the other hand, our results indicate that there is a negative relation between distance from built -up areas hand, our results indicate that there is a negative relation between distance from built-up areas and andfrequency fire frequency and recurrence buta a positive between the distance from built fire and recurrence and positive relationrelation between the distance from built-up areas-up and fire incidence: there are more fires, and more recurring events, in closer proximity to built-up areas, but the burnt areas that are closer to built-up areas are usually smaller than what is typically observed in more distant areas
This study investigated forest fires on a large-scale, covering the entire territory of Italy from both “horizontal” and “vertical” points of view

Summary

Introduction

Forest fire is an ecological factor in the Mediterranean region that often determines a wide range of impacts on ecosystem services [1]. The capability to understand and predict spatial patterns of forest fire occurrence and recurrence is crucial to improve the effectiveness of fire management resource allocation throughout large territories [2]. This is a remarkably complex research issue due to the multiple biophysical and socioeconomic drivers interacting over different spatial and temporal scales (e.g., [3,4,5]). Assessing and understanding the spatial patterns of wildfires may be a difficult task owing to limitations in fire recording protocols and the complexity of concurrent factors affecting wildfire ignition and spread.

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