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Fires: Wildland
Published in Yeqiao Wang, Landscape and Land Capacity, 2020
Wildland fires are regulated by a wide range of controls that vary significantly across the gradients of spatial and temporal scales. Fire triangles are often used to depict dominant controls at different scales. The characteristics of a single fire event are described by fire behavior parameters, while the characteristics of recurring fire events in a vast landscape over an extended period are described by fire regime parameters. Wildland fire is an essential natural disturbance, which greatly affects ecosystem productivity, biodiversity, forest landscape dynamics, and climate systems.[10] Humans have traditionally perceived fire as a damaging agent to nature, human lives, and economy. Recent advances in fire ecology have raised public awareness that fire is also an integral component of the Earth systems and has helped foster a shift in fire management policy from fire exclusion to prescribed burning, mechanical fuel treatment, and increased utilization of the existing wildland fire use policy.[11] This entry discusses causes (and controls), characteristics, consequences, and management of wildland fire.
Study on the socioeconomic and climatic effects of forest fire incidence in the Changbai Mountain area based on a cross-classified multilevel model
Published in Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk, 2023
Shuo Zhen, Hang Zhao, Zhengxiang Zhang, Yiwei Yin, Xin Wang
The fire regime triangle theory states that the comprehensive effect of three types of factors (vegetation, climate and ignition source) determines the regional wildfire dynamics. Studies on the interaction between multiple factors have been carried out at different spatial and temporal scales (Keeley 2004; Falk et al. 2007). At the regional and interannual scales, climate determines the spatial pattern of vegetation and the seasonal dynamics of fuels, shaping the geographic pattern and seasonal variability of wildfires (Archibald et al. 2013; Abatzoglou et al. 2018; Shen et al. 2019). At the local and short-term scales, weather conditions directly affect the flammability of fuels and risk of fire occurrence, which are generally measured by the fire weather index (Abatzoglou et al. 2019; Di Virgilio et al. 2019). Additionally, human activities are the major ignition sources that often cause large wildfires (Balch et al. 2017; Hantson et al. 2022). Previous studies generally considered socioeconomic data (such as total population, educated population and gross domestic product), land use/land cover, distance from infrastructure, accessibility and road density as proxies of ignition sources to quantify the impact of human activities on wildfires (Fuentes-Santos et al. 2013; Ruffault and Mouillot 2017; Rodrigues et al. 2018; Zambon et al. 2019; D’Este et al. 2020). In most cases, human factors were generally measured and analyzed at different administrative levels.
Monitoring of post-fire forest scars in Serbia based on satellite Sentinel-2 data
Published in Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk, 2020
Olga Brovkina, Marko Stojanović, Slobodan Milanović, Iscander Latypov, Nenad Marković, Emil Cienciala
Forest fires constitute natural and inevitable process. More than 65,000 wildfires occur annually in Europe, burning an area of some half-million hectares (San-Miguel-Ayanz et al. 2019). In recent decades, the severity and frequency of forest fires has increased along with total area burned (Moreira 2012). In Southern Europe, the major reasons related to fire regime changes lies in socio-economic changes occurring after World War II linked to land abandonment and afforestation of previously agricultural land. That caused more fuel accumulation and landscape-level connectivity of flammable parcels (Moreira 2012). In addition to land cover changes, the altered fire regime can be attributed also to increased temperature and shifted precipitation patterns (hotter and drier summer periods) caused by climate changes (Moriondo et al. 2006; Koutsias et al. 2013). According to Turco et al. (Turco et al. 2014), it can be expected that fire severity will increase particularly in Mediterranean countries, including the Balkans (Radovanovic et al. 2015).