3rd GoGreen Summit
23rd-24th, March 2018. Manila, Philippines
"Wildland fires, climate change and landscape perception in a region of eastern Spain"
Jaime Senabre
Researcher of the Group on Climate and Territorial Planning. University of Alicante (Spain).
Director of SINIF.
ISBN: 978-81-932966-1-5
Abstract
Wildland fires are a landscape modeling agent that is closely linked to climatic variations and the structure of vegetation. Although it depends on the species and zones, a burned forest can take in recovering between 50 and 100 years.
Modern societies have undergone recent socio-economic changes with implications for the landscape and the natural or sustainable fire regime. Some regions of southern Europe are particularly hit by recurrent episodes of fires. In Mediterranean areas forest fires reach a larger size and occur under extreme conditions. The Valencian Community is framed within a context of Mediterranean climate favorable to the spread of fire, where it is common for a few fires to affect a high percentage of the areaburned during the year and where human activities have conditioned and modified their capacity of recovery, mainly, due to recurrence.
In Spain, the Great Wildland Fires are those that leave the most trace in an increasingly ambushed landscape. Although they account for 0.18% of total claims, they account for 44% of the area burned each year. In the Valencian Community, this figure rises to 85%.
A forest fire is a disturbing phenomenon that can have a great territorial impact and suppose a dramatic change in the landscape. The visual fragility of the landscape is related to the capacity of visual absorption or ability of the landscape to accommodate modifications that produce variations in its visual character. At the time of determining the spread of fire, the structural configuration of the landscape plays an important role, for this reason in the analysis of risk and vulnerability it´s necessary to take into account the evolution of the characteristic elements of each landscape to managethe risk of an integral way.
In Mediterranean ecosystems, high population density increases ignitions and frequency of fires. The high temperatures, the drought and the west winds are the worst enemy of the forests, especially in the central and southeastern Mediterranean, scope of this study, in which, from a psychosocial approach, we will know some aspects about the way of perceiving the landscape in a region of eastern Spain.
In summary: The future fire regime depends not only on climate, but there are other factors that can be more relevant when modeling fires and landscapes, and, without a doubt, the human being is targeted as the main fire regime modifier throughout the planet.
