Environmental Sciences Proceedings, Volume 17, Issue 1

To construct time series for a Fire Weather Index (FWI), input weather series may come from various sources [...]

During a wildfire, combustible exterior building materials, like decking assemblies, may be ignited and cause severe damage or total loss of a dwelling [...]

We designed and tested an expert opinion-based multi-criteria model for the assessment of several components of the wildfire risk, including ignition and outbreak hazards (the probability of ignition “success”), propagation hazard, as wel...

Three recent studies from NSW (Australia) have tried to disentangle the many factors influencing house loss in wildfires at different scales [...]

Since the 1960s, Portugal has been affected by land use/land cover changes, resulting, nationwide, in an increase in fuel contiguity, availability and fire proneness [...]

Wildfires are a major threat to the environment and human populations [...]

The strategic project MED-Star—Strategies and measures for fire risk mitigation in the Mediterranean area—was funded by the Cross-border Cooperation Programme “Italy—France Maritime” from 2014 to 2020. The general object...

On 23 and 24 July in the province of Oristano (central western Sardinia) in the massif of Montiferru, an event classified as extreme wildfire (EWE) occurred, with vast-proportion fires at the limit of the so-called control capacity (internationally e...

Research applications of three-dimensional, time-dependent, computational fluid dynamics fire behavior models, such as the Wildland Urban Interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS) [...]

In Sardinia, the high inter-annual variability of rainfall, increase in average temperatures, and anthropic activities are determining factors for the detectable variations in the vegetation cover. Therefore, it is essential to build an integrated as...

The growing frequency of wildland fire events across the globe is creating an ever-increasing strain on communities and the resources which are necessary to manage those events, whether planned or unplanned. ArcGIS can improve situational awareness f...

Among the vectors of fire propagation towards buildings in the WUI, ornamental hedges have been identified as one of the main elements [...]

Wood materials used as furniture or construction at WUI constitute a hazard in case of wildfire exposure [...]

Natural hazards, such as fires and floods, are a fact of life. Swift responses and proactive planning can mitigate the severity of a disaster and lessen the potential for cascading impacts. Fire planners need to be able to quickly identify areas of h...

With global warming and rising occurrence of drought conditions, the risk of fire spreading at Wildland–Urban Interfaces (WUI) increases every year [...]

Wildfire ignition patterns are a key factor in fire regimes and, thus, increasing knowledge about where and why wildfires occur is essential to implement more effective prevention strategies. Furthermore, spatial predictions of potential fire ignitio...

Junction fires involve the merging of two linear fire fronts intersecting at a small angle which gives rise to an interaction process with fire-induced convective flows that modify the behavior of both fires and produce very large values of the rate...

Like many Mediterranean regions, Corsica is frequently exposed to forest fire risk [...]

The study of wildfire’s causes and ignition patterns, which in the Mediterranean area, are mainly directly or indirectly linked to human activities, is essential for designing effective wildfire risks reduction measures and to mitigate the rela...

Human-caused forest fires are becoming a severe threat to the Alpine region due to the increased temperatures and heatwaves in recent years [...]

Live fuel moisture (LFM) is essential for monitoring fire risk, since it influences vegetation flammability and the rate of spread of fires. Indeed, national and regional fire agencies typically use weather-based methods to predict and map LFM in an...

Extreme wildfires events (EWEs) represent a real challenge for any firefighting apparatus, as they exceed the current control capacity even in the best-prepared regions of the world, and they create destruction and a disproportionate number of fatali...

In recent years, the EU has implemented several firefighting-related policies to battle and reduce the negative impacts of wildfires [...]

Global change is increasing concerns regarding fire risk, especially for the wildland–urban interface (WUI). Indeed, different cross-national funded projects aim to develop new methodologies and technologies for assessing and reducing fire risk...

The 2021 European summer season has been one of the most intense for Mediterranean regions that experienced a heatwave in August, determining the onset of several fire events across regions in southern Europe [...]

Plant phenology reveals important information about the physiological status of plants, especially in relation to water availability [...]

Wildland–Urban Interface (WUI) fires pose great management challenges in terms of civil protection and fire mitigation, as firefighters’ capacities are often exceeded due to the need of simultaneous response to wildfire suppression, commu...

This work is devoted to presenting the communication activities carried out in the MED-Star project and the four joint projects (Intermed; Med-Coopfire; Med-Foreste; Med-PSS). MED-Star (“Strategies and measures to reduce wildfire risk in the Me...

The Medcoopfire project is part of the project system on forest fire management and aims to analyse, share and build a management model agreed between fire extinguishing operations through partnership. The objective is to develop a more effective str...

Over the last two decades, extreme wildfires across Sardinia have challenged firefighting efforts and heavily impacted communities. Heatwaves may become more frequent, increasing wildfire occurrence and intensity across Mediterranean Europe. As condi...

Undoubtedly, wildfires impacts have been increasing in the Mediterranean basin during the last decades. In Portugal, recent extreme fire events demanded science-based information to support priority measures to protect values at risk. Our results sho...

Extreme wildfire events exceeding control capacity are becoming a major environmental, economic and social threat, not only in fire-prone regions in Southern Europe, America and Oceania, but also in new areas such as Central and Northern Europe. The...

MED-PSS is a Franco-Italian cooperation project aiming at developing the culture of wildfire risk among the populations of the regions of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Corsica (France), and Liguria, Tuscany and Sardinia (Italy). It is pa...

In recent years, wildfires of unprecedented scale and duration have occurred in different regions of the world, a phenomenon that is expected to be exacerbated by climate change [...]

A key gap in conservation management is understanding how fire regimes may shift under climate change and how these shifts might impact biodiversity. Conserving species and communities in the future will require the strategic prioritisation of conser...

Ongoing climate change induces extreme phenomena and creates favourable conditions for the development of large fires [...]

Flashover phenomena in wildfires have been reported by firefighters and have caused a number of fatalities among their ranks [...]

Fires are an integral part of Mediterranean ecosystems, where they have played an ecological role for thousands of years [...]

Wildfires are one of the major natural hazards in various regions of the globe, such as California in the United States [¹], Australia, and in the Euro-Mediterranean region [²]. They have devastating impacts not only on local economy, agroforestry sy...

An automatic near-real-time (NRT) burned area (BA) mapping approach is presented [...]

When large urban agglomerations are located in wildfire prone regions, adapting to the demographic changes while limiting wildfire vulnerability of communities is a challenge for urban planners and policy-makers [...]

Inspired by the success of weather forecasts in recent years, we wonder if in the future we can follow the same successful path for improving the prediction of wildfire propagation. Hence, in analogy with this story, we start this research program fr...

Fires of natural origin are usually a very small fraction of the total number of fires in southern Europe, and as such, they are not relevant to contemporary fire regimes and policies, even if they occasionally develop into large-scale conflagrations...

The purpose of the S2IGI (Sistema Satellitare Integrato Gestione Incendi) project is to support the different phases of wildland fire prevention and management by a set of toolboxes, aiming to provide a short- and medium-term forecast of wildfire dan...

Mediterranean forests are strongly influenced by forest fires; however, global change is threatening the provision of ecosystem services by altering forest dynamics [...]

Rothermel-based decision support systems are widespread for fire behavior prediction and wildfire risk analysis [...]

The broadleaf tree species of the boreal biome of Canada have low flammability compared to conifers, which is in large part due to the high moisture content of their foliage. However, there is a period following snowmelt and prior to leaf budding (i....

Catastrophic effects of wildfires on human lives and assets have increased the prominence of wildfire in the media and across the scientific community, and the phrase “the new normal” is now widely used to describe the growing magnitude o...

Wildfire spread is of concern whenever the physical dimension of the involved area makes a scale jump due to several conditions, such as the interplay of nature and shape of the combustible terrain involved, the atmospheric conditions and the turbule...

Studies dealing with wildland fire at global or continental scales normally use coarse-resolution spatial units, within which fire-regime components are aggregated for statistical purposes [...]