Modelling the risk of forest fires in Catalonia (North-East Spain)

Joensuu

European Forest Institute

2007

S. 85-91

3 Abb., 24 Lit. Ang.

Artikel aus einer ZeitschriftUnselbständiges Werk

200143755

Scientific Tools and Research Needs for Multifunctional Mediterranean Forest Ecosystem Management, S. 85-91

The inclusion fire risk assessment into forest management enables the manager to analyse the risk and uncertainty due to forest fires, and assess the expected losses that fires may cause on the forest outputs. On the other hand, forest management and planning offers an appropriate framework for identifying efficient measures for long term fire prevention. If fire risk is to be included in forest management planning, models for assessing the probability of fire occurrence, and expected fire damage are required. As stands are regarded as the basic and indivisible forest management units, it is logical to develop stand-level models as the first step of including fire risk considerations in forest planning. These models must be based on stand variables the future value of which is known with reasonable accuracy. If a model is to be used for forest planning purposes, it also has to consider variables that are under the control of the manager. In that way the manager will have the possibility of minimising the expected losses due fire as a management objective in numerical planning calculations. Such models have been developed for Catalonia (North-East Spain) using data from the Spanish national forest inventory and perimeters of fires that occurred in Catalonia. Those models showed that both the occurrence of fires and the potential damage caused by fires are related to stand characteristics such as species composition, tree size, stand structure, and to topogeographical variables such as elevation and slope.