ESR4 Project

The undergoing global change is driven by climate warming, but is also enhanced by the shifting patterns of human communities behaviour and activities during the last decades. In Europe, people migrated from rural to urban areas with the consequent abandonment and replacement of traditional landscape uses. This, plus changes in forest management policies, did contribute to a progressive switch in land use and cover, affecting forest composition and structure, their habitat value, and the future provision of ecosystem services (Pausas et al., 1999; Pausas., 2004; Marlon et al., 2008; Tedim et al., 2015). This does not necessarily indicate that forests have been reduced in surface. Natural expansion and reforestation have increased forest area in some parts of the world, but such increment does not guarantee healthier forests (Keenan et al., 2015).

The recently established environmental conditions, both natural- and human-induced, have led to a new era of magnified natural risks, where human lives have become the first threatened value to protect, namely from wildfires.

This project addresses the drivers of extreme wildfires and their behaviour in southern Europe, providing an understanding of the interdisciplinary drivers of megafires, quantifying their respective roles (with an emphasis on novel fuel configurations and extreme fire weather conditions), and of their fire behaviour characteristics.

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