The management of fire complexity at the edge of criticality. From analysis of fire case studies, to a synthesis approach for mediterranean forest landscapes and for emergency management organization
- Autores: Jordi Oliveres
- Directores de la Tesis: Martí Rosas Casals (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Fire regimes are changing under the influence of global change. On the European continent, landscape memory in the 21st century is dominated by an accumulation of forest fuel and irrupted by a progressive climatic forcing that generates a latitudinal and altitudinal escalation of wildfire generations. Catalonia, and especially the mountain areas, is located within these pyro-climatic niches where the gradients of productivity-aridity are in a situation of remarkable vulnerability. Fires in these impact areas are expected to play an ecological role of renewal with no precedents in recent history, at the expense of a high socio-ecological severity in the short-medium term, though.
In the first block, the thesis analyses the probability distributions of burned areas at different space-time scales in order to better understand the statistical nature of fires in Catalonia in recent history. In line with other existing publications, the analysis demonstrates the positive impact of the fire prevention and extinction system, with a significant reduction of the potential of large fires since the beginning of the 21st century. At the same time, the analysis also shows an arched back effect in the middle range of the probability distributions, as well as a more sustained correlation in the lower range of fires, since there is a better field data collection. The analysis focuses on different space-time aggregates in Catalonia, paying special attention to the Pyrenees region.
In the second block, the research effort focuses on the synthesis of a case study. Knowledge of basic research is used, previously available tools for modelling the dynamics of the landscape are adapted, and new parameters are proposed such as the ecological fire flow. Although the case study responds to a demand from the government of Aran to promote a program of prescribed burns, it is above all an explicit proposal of the Catalan Fire and Rescue Services to prototype fire management in the Pyrenees including the lessons of the community of experts as well as the concerns of public and private managers in a context of global change. The synthesis consists in integrating tactical expertise and scientific knowledge to provide a technically viable alternative (project design and project management) which in turn offers an Aran-sized modelling tool capable of integrating succession dynamics, fire regime, climatic scenarios and different alternatives of response / management, as well as of quantifying the impacts on key environmental vectors such as habitat diversity and effects on protective forests, among others.
The thesis demonstrates the potential benefit of positive fire selection from the statistical analysis of the historical fire regime (the hammer effect) and the virtual experimentation (MEDFIRE Aran). On this basis, it proposes a framework of action (the pyro-sustainability) specifically adapted to the size of Aran territory which allows to deploy strategies for both the extinction and reduction of the high severity, and the use prescribed in formed burns and fire management in pre-agreed and pre-planned spaces. The general aim here is to break with the paradox of extinction and to align the resilience of the landscape with the changing climatic conditions in the medium-long term. Many scientific contributions conclude the need to change from the era of extinction to the era of regime management. The thesis precisely provides an effective methodology for sustainable coexistence with fire, applicable to the Pyrenees and other mountain massifs, which would prevent these large biodiversity pools from being left to the chance of extreme weather.
