AN OVERVIEW OF FOREST FIRES

Jaime SenabreDirector of SINIF

Chairman of the Scientific-Professional Committee of the National Symposium on Forest Fires.

Psychologist and Chief of the Wildland Fire Brigade.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Landscape fires have played an important role in shaping the distribution and the environmental performance of many of the world's ecosystems.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

The man's hand, intentionally or unintentionally, has played an important role in expanding the area of flammable ecosystems and certain key attributes changed fire regimes, manipulating them to serve their diverse needs and purposes.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

The use of anthropogenic fire has been in the past, and remains today, one of the engines on large-scale anthropogenic transformation of the natural systems of the Earth.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

The different anthropogenic fire regimes that exist in the Earth system appear to be a product of cultural interactions and land use and attributes of history.

Hunting and gathering, agriculture and animal husbandry, conservation and recreation human activities, logging and forestry, among others, have helped shape these fire regimes.

Other disturbing phenomena may also have played a role in fire regimes, such as wars, disease, migration and settlement, and the climate change.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

The human factor is probably significantly involved in this evolution of historical fire patterns.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Large fires today form a new type of anthropogenic fire regime characterized by a lower frequency, a season of different fire (occurring mainly in summer and not in spring or late autumn as in the past) increasing the intensity of the fire, the fires of drinks and, in general, an increase in burned area.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Socio-economic and cultural changes in the productive model as in the form of life occurred in the twentieth century have been drawing a picture increasingly complex from the point of view of fighting forest fires, encouraging the development of masses of vegetation uncontrolled and the appearance of large numbers of cores residential population or other types of population center on forest floor.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

The virtual disappearance of forestry planning and management in recent decades, driven, among other things, the lack of financial resources has led to the current situation of abandonment, finding mountains with large areas of continuous vegetation and poor infrastructure preventive.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Most of society now understands the mountains as a leisure and sport rather than as a productive space.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Many agricultural areas have been gradually being abandoned by the lack of profitability, productivity, or directly by the lack of willing to assume field work generational change, slowly causing the abandonment of rural areas.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Fires by negligence and accidents, today, are the most often mentioned in the last twenty years, ie, fires caused by people who had no intention of burn the forest.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Although technology advances, and new media available to mitigate the fires, they continue to rise.

Anthropology and Ecology of Fire

Currently, forest fires have gone from being a natural disturbance modeling the landscape, to be a threat, so in more than 95% of cases, it is caused by humans.

Forest Fires and Climate Change

Extreme weather conditions, accentuated in the last decade by the effects of climate change called, is considered one of the main triggers of episodes of forest fires in the Iberian Peninsula.

High temperatures and low rainfall predispose to greater ease of ignition of combustible.

These conditions together with local winds cause increased virulence of forest fires, leading to a difficulty in controlling the fire, translated into a higher cost of the work of extinction and, more seriously, a high risk of accidents.

Forest Fires and Climate Change

The massive accumulation of fuel loads and afforestation with highly flammable species have contributed in many cases to the creation of new ecosystems that when burned tend to show an extreme intensity and emit large amounts of greenhouse gases.

Effects of Forest Fires

Every year forest fires contribute to the destruction of forest ecosystems, mainly due to the elimination of protective vegetation cover and land degradation, with declining soil quality for the loss of organic matter and nutrients needed for development plants, favored by post-fire erosion, with massive and irreversible loss of soil that can lead to desertification.

Effects of Forest Fires

Despite the low numerical incidence of large forest fires (an average of 30 per year in the period 1991-2011), they frequently involve a large amount of the annual area burned.

Effects of Forest Fires

The fire is a recurrent phenomenon in Mediterranean ecosystems and the effect on the structure and dynamics of vegetation depends largely on the severity of the fire and this structure and flammability of different species burned.

Effects of Forest Fires

The uncontrolled proliferation of forest fires in recent years has aggravated the effects of vegetation and soil, that looks weathered its most elementary stage.

Effects of Forest Fires

The severity with which the fire can affect an area will depend on parameters defining the fire regime in a particular area such as: size, frequency, period of recurrence, seasonality and intensity of fires.

Forest Management

Every year millions of Kw of energy accumulating in our forests susceptible to becoming combustible material for wildfires.

The fire exclusion policies have complicated the current complex situation and evolution of anthropogenic fire regimes.

Forest Management

The costs of fire exclusion in Spain have increased dramatically in the past three decades, without obtaining the expected results in terms of industrial profits, burnt and affected by the fires of the landscape, and the number of incidents of anthropogenic fires surface.

Forest Management

Forest management must be sustainable, so that the economic exploitation of forests must support the living conditions of local communities and the universal goal of greater preservation of one of the most important ecological functions of forests, the carbon retention.

Forest Management

The seeder species of the Mediterranean grow much faster, need lower temperatures to produce flame and shown rapid combustion.

On the other hand, the resprouting species need higher temperatures to initiate combustion and high fuel loads may cause more difficult to extinguish forest fires, but need more time for complete combustion.

So, the ecosystems dominated by seeders are more likely to fire than those dominated by resprouting species.

New Scene

The increase in housing developments and isolated in forest areas creates a complex scene emergency planning, known as wildland-urban interface.

New Scene

The significant increase in population centers within or in contact with the perimeter of areas without vegetation management an increase of potential risk to the population, which can be affected by an emergency resulting from a forest fire or agricultural vegetation generating a Emergency situations most sensitive and committed to those they may face today professionals extinction.

New Scene

In interface fires, the firefighting was complicated by the existence of urbanized centers, the materials used in the construction of some houses and, above all, to the priority of the security of the population.

New Scene

The drafting and execution of Self-Protection Plans are targeted as a preventive measure and minimize these risks. When working in urban interface areas - forestry, variability of scenarios is virtually infinite, hence the need to establish minimum safety through an appropriate regulatory framework that forces owners to communities and individuals to implement self-protection measures.

New Scene

The debate between the choice of evacuation or confinement remains open, front of the magnitude of the evacuations that the operational services have to raise in some cases or situations.

Actions

It should consider the reintroduction of prescribed burning practices in the landscape to promote the resilience of forest ecosystems and their adjustment.

Actions

The development of fire danger indices can be a useful tool in predicting and combating forest fires.

Actions

Fighting forest fires has to think integrally, taking measures for fire prevention (awareness campaigns for citizens, security, forestry work or even controlled burns to reduce fuel, etc.) becoming necessary, effective for extinguishing fires (effective management of human and material resources available to the extinction) and measures for immediate action on soils affected by fire strategies as well as the restoration of the forest ecosystem (soil and vegetation) affected by the fire.

Actions

Optimization and prioritization of prevention activities in order to avoid and / or mitigate the effects caused by the fire is necessary.

Actions

Preventive silviculture treatments on the existing mass, modification of internal gardening plots with buildings, improving access and evacuation routes, road signs, information on the usual operating procedures of extinction and training activities oriented population will be aspects to consider when performing tasks of self-protection in an effective and useful way, to help professionals extinguishing media to improve performance and can work in more remote areas, and having a stable infrastructure to improve operational safety conditions.

Actions

An adequate network of hydrants, the need for road approach to designing buildings and perimeter strips must be to consider preventive measures.

Actions

Grazing and forest utilization, complemented by the Fire Prevention Plans, are needed to limit the combustibility of forests measures.

Actions

Many of the large wildfires are patterns that repeat over time, so it is advisable to carry out preventive measures to prevent history repeating itself.

Actions

It is important that people become aware of the economic and criminal liability that may involve starting a fire, which can contribute, from a police prism, to reduce the number of fires, but at the same time exerts a preventive work.

Actions

A better understanding of the causes of forest fires can reduce the number of them and the damage they cause, since most of them are the result of behavior, situations and events that can be modified.

At the same time, a preventive planning based on accurate knowledge of the causes, reduce costs extinction.

Conclusions

We live in an ever flammable world.

They burned each year between six and fourteen million hectares, which act on the structure and composition of forests, and also affect the health of humans and the supply of goods and services of peoples.

Conclusions

Changes in land use and global climate change may affect the enlargement of the fires and the frequency of episodes of major fires.

Conclusions

Forest fires cause each year serious ecological and economic losses, so that the various authorities with responsibility in this area should make major investments in prevention, detection and suppression of forest fires, as well as the recovery of the affected areas, sometimes irrecoverable.

thank you very much for your attention!!