Abstract
In recent decades, wildfires have become a serious threat worldwide, producing disasters in the natural and anthropogenic environment as well as serious economic losses. One of wildfire’s major impacts is soil erosion, as it may cause major problems in both the physical and anthropogenic environment and seriously affect the landscape. This study investigates the soil erosion rate changes in areas affected by wildfires and uses, as a pilot area, the drainage basin of the Pinios earth-filled dam located in the Ilia Regional Unit, western Greece, which has suffered serious erosion changes after a wildfire event. For this purpose, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) is applied in GIS software, and the soil erosion rate changes in the selected investigation area are estimated at different time intervals. Specifically, soil erosion rate changes are calculated by importing the factors from the RUSLE equation in the GIS software and uses as a dependent variable the cover management factor C, which is strongly influenced by large destructive fires. The models that are produced are compared with each other by collating average annual soil erosion maps and rates before the fire, immediately after the fire and for the existing conditions occurring in the pilot area.
Highlights
Wildfire is defined as a combustible flammable liquid that is difficult to eliminate and which was widely used by ancient Greeks in warfare
Based on the factor analysis and calculation presented in the previous paragraphs, and with the use of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) equation imported in the Geographic Information System (GIS) framework, annual soil erosion maps are produced
The first map is related to the soil erosion condition that existed before the wildfire incident, the second map is related to the post-fire soil erosion condition and the third map reflects the existing soil erosion condition (Figure 13)
Summary
Wildfire is defined as a combustible flammable liquid that is difficult to eliminate and which was widely used by ancient Greeks in warfare. According to the EC PESETA II (Projection of Economic impacts of climate change in Sectors of the European Union based on bottom-up Analysis) project report [1] and information derived by European Forest and Fire Information Systems, the impact of forest and wood fires in the EU during the years 2000–2017 caused 480,000 ha/year of burned land, 34 human losses/year and EUR 3 billion/year of economic losses. Approximately eighty-five percent of the total burned area in Europe occurred in South Europe, among the Mediterranean countries. This is because the Mediterranean countries are suffering from extreme fire events even in June and October and their natural, geographic, and climate characteristics enable the outbursts of wildfires and the phenomenon of post-fire erosion [2]
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