TITLE OF THE PROJECT:
Landscape susceptibility and vulnerability to large severe megafires along the Iberian Atlantic-Mediterranean climatic gradient: nature-based solutions for proactive forest management
ACRONYM OF THE PROJECT:
LANDSUSFIRE
SUMMARY OF THE PROJECT:
Drastic changes in the forest fire regime, including an increase in the extent and severity of forest fires, have been detected in the Euro-Mediterranean region over the last decades. Socio-economic transitions and increased incidence of extreme weather events have been identified as the main drivers of these changes in southern European countries. Thus, in 2022, an unprecedented series of extreme fires (mega-fires) was recorded, coinciding with the most severe drought episode in Europe in the last 500 years. Large and severe mega-fires pose not only a serious threat to human lives and infrastructure, especially in the context of the wildland-urban interface, but also to the resilience, functioning and capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services. The LANDSUSFIRE project will integrate the interdisciplinary expertise of research teams from the universities of León and Oviedo to respond to the current challenges of forest fire research. Firstly, innovative methodologies will be developed in the field of remote sensing to assess spatial variations in severity along the Atlantic-Mediterranean axis of the Iberian Peninsula. This information will facilitate the identification of critical areas where post-fire restoration can be applied in the short term. The project will also develop severe fire susceptibility models with generalisation capacity based on the identification of severity conditions linked to fuel structure and landscape configuration, which will be key in the definition of pre-fire management strategies. In addition, the explicit consideration of urban-forest interfaces will help to locate the most susceptible areas, considering the risks to human populations and their property. Another novel aspect that will be addressed by LANDSUSFIRE, and that will allow progress in the approach of proactive management actions, is the knowledge of the interactions between the socio-economic factors that drive the dynamics of land use and the different types of landscape mosaics with different susceptibility to high severity fires. The project will also generate new knowledge on the effects of severity on the resilience and multifunctionality of ecosystems and their complex interactions, as well as respond to the challenge of spatialising this information at the landscape scale. All this knowledge is essential to design management strategies to reduce territorial vulnerability to severe fires and to conserve the services provided by ecosystems to society. The development of the project will respond to the challenge of generating useful knowledge to design forest fire resilient territories through a new management approach that integrates natural and socio-economic systems, based on nature-based and nature-supported solutions to reduce territorial susceptibility and vulnerability to severe forest fires in the Atlantic-Mediterranean axis of the Iberian Peninsula. These solutions will offer environmental, economic and social benefits and foster the development of scientific knowledge.
KEY WORDS OF THE PROJECT:
Large forest fires, indicators, severity, resilience, exotic species, ecosystem services, pre and post fire management
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