Abstract
Summer fires frequently rage across Mediterranean Europe, often intensified by high temperatures and droughts. According to the state-of-the-art regional fire risk projections, in forthcoming decades climate effects are expected to become stronger and possibly overcome fire prevention efforts. However, significant uncertainties exist and the direct effect of climate change in regulating fuel moisture (e.g. warmer conditions increasing fuel dryness) could be counterbalanced by the indirect effects on fuel structure (e.g. warmer conditions limiting fuel amount), affecting the transition between climate-driven and fuel-limited fire regimes as temperatures increase. Here we analyse and model the impact of coincident drought and antecedent wet conditions (proxy for the climatic factor influencing total fuel and fine fuel structure) on the summer Burned Area (BA) across all eco-regions in Mediterranean Europe. This approach allows BA to be linked to the key drivers of fire in the region. We show a statistically significant relationship between fire and same-summer droughts in most regions, while antecedent climate conditions play a relatively minor role, except in few specific eco-regions. The presented models for individual eco-regions provide insights on the impacts of climate variability on BA, and appear to be promising for developing a seasonal forecast system supporting fire management strategies.
Highlights
Forest fires are a complex natural process associated with factors of different origin, such as climate and weather, human activities and vegetation conditions[13]
Anthropogenic ignition is dominant in most Mediterranean regions[14], variations in the ease of ignition and in the conditions affecting fire after ignition are mainly governed by the presence, amount and connectivity of fuel and its moisture content, which in turn depend on climate variability[13]
The link between climate and fire is often analysed under the intermediate fire-productivity hypothesis[17,18,19], which suggests that fire activity reaches two minimums, one dominated by high aridity values where fire spread is mostly limited by the fuel amount, and another characterised by low aridity where fuels are abundant and fires are mainly limited by the fuel moisture content
Summary
To identify the key drought variables potentially affecting the Burned Area we use an empirical approach and systematically explore cross-correlations between detrended drought variables and fires for each eco-region in Mediterranean Europe (see Supplementary Fig. S1). For those regions where no coincident drought variable is found, the standard correlation is tested.
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