Abstract
Climate change causes more extreme droughts and heat waves in Central Europe, affecting vegetative fuels and altering the local fire regime. Wildfire is projected to expand into the temperate zone, a region traditionally not concerned by fire. To mitigate this new threat, local forest management will require spatial fire hazard information. We present a holistic and comprehensible workflow for quantifying fuels and wildfire hazard through fire spread simulations. Surface and canopy fuels characteristics were sampled in a small managed temperate forest in Northern Germany. Custom fuel models were created for each dominant species (Pinus sylvestris, Fagus sylvatica, and Quercus rubra). Canopy cover, canopy height, and crown base height were directly derived from airborne LiDAR point clouds. Surface fuel types and crown bulk density (CBD) were predicted using random forest and ridge regression, respectively. Modeling was supported by 119 predictors extracted from LiDAR, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2 data. We simulated fire spread from random ignitions, considering eight environmental scenarios to calculate fire behavior and hazard. Fuel type classification scored an overall accuracy of 0.971 (Kappa = 0.967), whereas CBD regression performed notably weaker (RMSE = 0.069; R2 = 0.73). Higher fire hazard was identified for strong winds, low fuel moisture, and on slopes. Fires burned fastest and most frequently on slopes in large homogeneous pine stands. These should be the focus of preventive management actions.
Highlights
Climate change is expected to cause more extreme drought periods and heat waves throughout Central Europe [1]
Custom fire behavior fuel models (FBFM) are created from the median of each parameter
Significant differences between all fuel models can be observed for 1 h fuels
Summary
Climate change is expected to cause more extreme drought periods and heat waves throughout Central Europe [1]. Temperate regions, which are traditionally not prone to fire, may experience more and larger wildfires [2]. The vast majority of the wildfires in Germany are man-made (~95%) and tend to be much smaller than fires in typical fire-prone regions, such as North America [5]. In contrast to, for example, Mediterranean countries, in Central Europe, both the vegetation firefighting capacities and society’s awareness of fire hazard are in an early stage of development. This gap between the increased susceptibility to fire through rapid environmental change and lagging fire suppression capabilities may hold challenges in the near future
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