Abstract

The number of forest fires ignitions has decreased worldwide, thus observing increased levels of intensity and destruction, endangering urban areas and causing material damages and deaths (Portugal, 2017). Forest fire hazard mapping supported by the surveillance strategy targeted at very susceptible areas with high losses potential are the common tools of fire prevention. Each municipality creates its own Forest Fire Hazard Map, and so it is observed that along the administrative boundaries, discrepancies occur, even when identical types of land use are in place. The evolution of geographic information systems technology sustained by the open-source satellite imagery, along with the innovative Habitat Risk Assessment model of the InVEST software, allowed the creation of an easily applicable trans-administrative boundary fire hazard map, with frequent update capabilities and fully open source. This work considered three municipalities (Tomar, Ourém, and Ferreira do Zêzere) that annually observe various forest fire occurrences. Results enabled the creation of a homogeneous Forest Fire Risk Map, using landuse, slope, road access network, fire ignitions’ history, visualization basins, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as variables. All variables correlate with each other using different weights, in which the different classes of land use are considered as habitats and the remaining variables as fire hazard stressors. The results produce a coherent monthly updated Risk Map, which is an alternative to many risk assessment systems used worldwide.

Highlights

  • Wildfires arise naturally from sources such as spontaneous combustion of dry matter, under high temperatures and wind conditions, or most commonly lightning strikes [1]

  • Results delivered as risk maps from the Habitat and Species Risk Assessment (HRA) for the study region were tested using the different sets of stressors to understand the differences between slow and dynamic variables

  • Results generated from the InVEST HRA in the production of the MIR map (Figure 5a) are considerably different from the PMDFCI; when we focus on municipal boundaries, a soft transboundary risk classification can be observed (Figure 5b)

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Summary

Introduction

Wildfires arise naturally from sources such as spontaneous combustion of dry matter, under high temperatures and wind conditions, or most commonly lightning strikes [1]. Mediterranean forests are regularly subjected to a large number of fires [4,5,6], changes in land use patterns [7], and the impacts of socio-economic factors on land management practices [8], further aggravated by major modifications to forest ecosystems during the second half of the 20th century [9] along with forest modification by fire recurrence [10] contributed towards wildfire intensification. The number of occurrences regarding forest fires has decreased worldwide [12], observing increased levels of intensity and destruction, which in many cases endanger urban areas, causing material damage and deaths, such as those that occurred in Portugal in 2017 [9]. In particular forest fires, are increasing in intensity, reaching catastrophic dimensions, as a result of poor forest management, territorial planning, and economic pressures, driven by aggravated climate change conditions [7,10,13]

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