Abstract
We aimed to analyze the relationship between fire regime attributes and the post-fire greenness recovery of fire-prone pine ecosystems over the short (2-year) and medium (5-year) term after a large wildfire, using both a single and a combined fire regime attribute approach. We characterized the spatial (fire size), temporal (number of fires, fire recurrence, and return interval), and magnitude (burn severity of the last fire) fire regime attributes throughout a 40-year period with a long-time series of Landsat imagery and ancillary data. The burn severity of the last fire was measured by the dNBR (difference of the Normalized Burn Ratio) spectral index, and classified according to the ground reference values of the CBI (Composite Burn Index). Post-fire greenness recovery was obtained through the difference of the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) between pre- and post-fire Landsat scenes. The relationship between fire regime attributes (single attributes: fire recurrence, fire return interval, and burn severity; combined attributes: fire recurrence-burn severity and fire return interval-burn severity) and post-fire greenness recovery was evaluated using linear models. The results indicated that all the single and combined attributes significantly affected greenness recovery. The single attribute approach showed that high recurrence, short return interval and low severity situations had the highest vegetation greenness recovery. The combined attribute approach allowed us to identify a wider variety of post-fire greenness recovery situations than the single attribute one. Over the short term, high recurrence as well as short return interval scenarios showed the best post-fire greenness recovery independently of burn severity, while over the medium term, high recurrence combined with low severity was the most recovered scenario. This novel combined attribute approach (temporal plus magnitude) could be of great value to forest managers in the development of post-fire restoration strategies to promote vegetation recovery in fire-prone pine ecosystems in the Mediterranean Basin under complex fire regime scenarios.
Highlights
Forest fires are the predominant disturbance in many regions of the world [1,2]
Our results demonstrated that all the fire regime attributes that were spatially characterized, whether they followed a single or combined approach, were significantly related to the post-fire recovery of vegetation greenness
The combination of fire recurrence or fire return interval with burn severity was able to identify a larger variety of scenarios of post-fire greenness recovery than the single approach, the combined attributes being the best predictors of post-fire recovery of vegetation greenness
Summary
Forest fires are the predominant disturbance in many regions of the world [1,2] This is the case in the Mediterranean Basin, where fire has a significant effect on the functioning and structure of ecosystems [3,4]. The fire return interval can be a determinant parameter in the recovery of ecosystems that need long periods to achieve maturity This is the case of many pine ecosystems in the Mediterranean Basin, whose dominant tree species need up to 15 years to achieve maturity or to produce a large seed bank ensuring post-fire recruitment [7,17,18]. This information is of great interest for managers to promote ecosystem resiliency [24], and to design adequate post-fire restoration strategies
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