Abstract
Fire frequency and fire seasonality are among the main components of the fire regime. In the Mediterranean Basin, climate directly drives fire occurrence, controlling fuel flammability and determining the fire-prone conditions, so that intense fires prevail during the dry and warm season of the year. However, humans also play a direct role in wildfire regimes, severely altering fuel features, fire policies and land-use management, as well as the timing and location of fire ignitions, to such an extent that anthropogenic activities have overcome the role of climate in shaping fire regimes. The main purpose of this work is to propose a graphical tool capable of identifying the most fire-prone portions of the territory and to explore the differences between the summer and winter fire risk; to this end, we analyzed the seasonal fire risk in the Latium region (central Italy) and its drivers in terms of land-use types, by using a fuel phenology framework. The results demonstrated that climate is not the main cause of bimodal seasonality in fire occurrence and that the existence of two annual fire seasons in Latium is strongly correlated with how humans use fire as a land management tool. The proposed approach may represent an easy-to-interpret pyrogeographical framework applicable in any environment and updatable over time, useful for identifying spatial gradients, and for recognizing fire regime temporal patterns.
Highlights
In the last few decades, the fire regime has become a key concept in fire ecology; a clear understanding is still lacking [1]
Fire ignitions show a a marked tendency to concentrate in the southern part of Latium, while the other areas feature more marked tendency to concentrate in the southern part of Latium, while the other areas feature more dispersion
This paper presented a simple methodological procedure to analyze fire seasonality and the influence of land use in fire occurrence within a fuel phenology zoning framework
Summary
In the last few decades, the fire regime has become a key concept in fire ecology; a clear understanding is still lacking [1]. Fire regimes have always changed through time, especially in relation to environmental variation and human activities [2,3,4]. Understanding both natural and anthropogenic controls on fire behavior is a challenge in assessing fire risk and, human safety. Fire distribution in the landscape is not random; in most cases, fires show a preference for certain land-use types depending on fuel presence and characteristics [6,7,8]. Fire frequency depends on fire occurrence and it was defined as the total number of fires recorded over a given period and area [10].
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