Abstract
Abstract. We focus here on a mainland Continental Portuguese Rural Fire Database (PRFD) that includes 450 000 fires, the largest such database in Europe in terms of total number of recorded fires in the 1980–2005 period. In this work, we (a) list the most important factors for triggering and controlling the fire regime in mainland Continental Portugal, (b) describe the dataset's production, (c) discuss procedures adopted to identify and correct different fire data inconsistencies, creating a modified PRFD which we use here and make available as Supplement, (d) explore some basic temporal and completeness properties of the data. We find that the dataset's minimum measured burnt areas have changed with time between AF = 0.1 ha (1980–1990), AF = 0.01 ha (1991–1992), and AF = 0.001 ha (1992–2005), with varying degrees of completeness down to these values. These changes in minimum area measured are responsible for greater numbers of fires being recorded. A relatively small number of large fires in the PRFD are responsible for the majority of the burnt area. For example, fires with AF > 100 ha represent about 1% of all fire records but 75% of total burnt area. Finally, we consider for each Continental Portugal district and for the 26-yr period, the total number of rural fires and area burnt in forests and shrublands, each normalized by district areas. We find that the highest numbers of fires per unit area are in highly populated districts, and that the largest fraction of burnt area is in forested areas, coinciding with large parcels of continuous forests (predominantly rural and moderately urban areas).
Highlights
This paper examines the Portuguese Rural Fire Database (PRFD), provided by the Autoridade Florestal Nacional (AFN, 2011), the current Portuguese Forest Service, which includes information for more than 450 000 fire records that have occurred in Continental Portugal for the 26-yr period, 1980–2005
Examples of a dataset that falls into the first classification include the meteorological re-analysis databases of NCEP/NCAR (Kalnay et al, 1996), where there is a quality control implemented in the model and data assimilation system, and the European Climate Assessment database (Klein Tank et al, 2002), where statistical procedures are applied in order to test the homogeneity of the database
The Portuguese Rural Fire Database (PRFD) that we have examined is an example of a dataset that falls into the second class, i.e. that of essentially “raw” data
Summary
This paper examines the Portuguese Rural Fire Database (PRFD), provided by the Autoridade Florestal Nacional (AFN, 2011), the current Portuguese Forest Service, which includes information for more than 450 000 fire records that have occurred in Continental Portugal for the 26-yr period, 1980–2005. For the entire 1980–2009 period (Table 1), after normalizing the number of fires and total area burnt for each country (again, within the limitations of completeness of the data gathered), by the correspondent country’s total land area (AC), Portugal has six (three) times more fires (burnt area) per unit area than Italy, the second most fire-affected country. This approach may be useful for the larger wildland fire research community, stressing the need to address similar caveats in the datasets used in their analysis In this sense, the main objectives of this work are: (i) to describe the assembling and confirmation procedures that have been used to generate the PRFD; (ii) to present the procedures used to identify and correct a number of PRFD errors; (iii) to present and interpret some of the PRFD characteristics, including spatial and temporal distributions of the fires. (Sect. 2) we present a description of the most important factors that affect the rural fire
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