Abstract
Aim of study: Human settlements and activities have completely modified landscape structure in the Mediterranean region. Vegetation patterns show the interactions between human activities and natural processes on the territory, and allow understanding historical ecological processes and socioeconomic factors. The arrangement of land uses in the rural landscape can be perceived as a proxy for human activities that often lead to the use, and escape, of fire, the most important disturbance in our forest landscapes. In this context, we tried to predict human-caused fire occurrence in a 5-year period by quantifying landscape patterns.Area of study: This study analyses the Spanish territory included in the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands (497,166 km2).Material and Methods: We evaluated spatial pattern applying a set of commonly used landscape ecology metrics to landscape windows of 10x10 sq km (4751 units in the UTM grid) overlaid on the Forest Map of Spain, MFE200.Main results: The best logistic regression model obtained included Shannon’s Diversity Index, Mean Patch Edge and Mean Shape Index as explicative variables and the global percentage of correct predictions was 66.3 %.Research highlights: Our results suggested that the highest probability of fire occurrence at that time was associated with areas with a greater diversity of land uses and with more compact patches with fewer edges.Keywords: human-caused wildfires; landscape ecology; logistic regression.
Highlights
Landscape structure is the result of past and present interactions between human activities and natural processes (De Aranzabal et al, 2008; Echeverría et al, 2007; Löfman and Kouki, 2003; Naveh and Lieberman, 1994; Serra et al, 2008)
The correlation between the Mean Shape Index (MSI) and the Area-Weighted Mean Shape Index (AWMSI) was moderate. Both have a similar behaviour, MSI is more influenced by the area of the observation unit
Interpretation of the Wald statistic indicated that Shannon’s Diversity Index (SHDI) was the variable with greater weight in the adjusted model (Wald = 280.97), followed by Mean Patch Edge (MPE) (Wald = 24.67) and MSI (Wald = 5.80)
Summary
Landscape structure is the result of past and present interactions between human activities and natural processes (De Aranzabal et al, 2008; Echeverría et al, 2007; Löfman and Kouki, 2003; Naveh and Lieberman, 1994; Serra et al, 2008). Landscape composition and configuration metrics have been proved to be influenced by climate (Pickett and White, 1985), forest pests and diseases (Hatala et al, 2010; Romero et al, 2007), land use changes (Ferraz et al, 2009; Gallant et al, 2003; Serra et al, 2008), human settlements (Fuller, 2001), deforestation (Löfman and Kouki, 2003; Zhang and Guindon, 2005), the abandonment of traditional agrarian tasks (plowing, grazing and cutting) (De Aranzabal et al, 2008) and fires: burned area and frequency (Chang et al, 2007; Moreno, 2007; Naveh and Lieberman, 1994; Pickett and White, 1985). Landscape patterns are created by direct human action through the design of boundaries between crops and natural vegetation, wildland-urban
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