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Investigation of the Causes of Forest Fires and Post-fire Prevention...
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Investigation of the Causes of Forest Fires and Post-fire Prevention and Recovery

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Natural Hazards and Risk Management".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2022) | Viewed by 11309

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Raffaella Lovreglio

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Nuoro Forestry School, Department of Agriculture, University of Sassari, 07100 Sassari, Italy
Interests: fire; ecology; forest conservation; silviculture; fire ecology; vegetation; forest ecology; ecological restoration
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The current wildfire management policies are mainly focused on suppression, with little attention given to wildfire prevention. In addition, the high number of ignitions and the difficulty in understanding their source explain the high rate of unknown causes, thus partially explaining the low reliability of the statistics regarding fire causes and ignition sources. The causes are more diverse than is often assumed, and fire initiation is neither as random nor, in some cases, as meaningless as some analyses suggest. Understanding the reasons why fires start is a crucial factor when determining what to do to prevent or reduce their incidence, to mount significant prevention efforts and to design specific fire prevention campaigns. Another aspect that is poorly dealt with in forest fire planning is prevention and post-fire recovery, which is essential to mitigate (or increase) the impacts on functions, such as carbon flux variation, soil protection or plant diversity. This Special Issue of Forests focuses on the different techniques for investigating the causes and sources of fires that have been the subject of international research in order to broaden knowledge in this little-explored field, as well as on new research into fundamental intervention methods to speed up the recovery and restoration processes of ecosystems affected by the passage of fire at different levels of severity. Research articles may focus on any aspect that concerns the knowledge of the fire phenomenon and new post-fire recovery and restoration techniques.

Dr. Raffaella Lovreglio
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • causes
  • investigation
  • motivation
  • post-fire recovery
  • restoration technique

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 3659 KiB  
Article
Assessing Sumatran Peat Vulnerability to Fire under Various Condition of ENSO Phases Using Machine Learning Approaches
by Lilik Budi Prasetyo, Yudi Setiawan, Aryo Adhi Condro, Kustiyo Kustiyo, Erianto Indra Putra, Nur Hayati, Arif Kurnia Wijayanto, Almi Ramadhi and Daniel Murdiyarso
Forests 2022, 13(6), 828; https://doi.org/10.3390/f13060828 - 25 May 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3065
Abstract
In recent decades, catastrophic wildfire episodes within the Sumatran peatland have contributed to a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) modulates the occurrence of fires in Indonesia through prolonged hydrological drought. Thus, assessing peatland vulnerability to fires and [...] Read more.
In recent decades, catastrophic wildfire episodes within the Sumatran peatland have contributed to a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) modulates the occurrence of fires in Indonesia through prolonged hydrological drought. Thus, assessing peatland vulnerability to fires and understanding the underlying drivers are essential to developing adaptation and mitigation strategies for peatland. Here, we quantify the vulnerability of Sumatran peat to fires under various ENSO conditions (i.e., El-Nino, La-Nina, and Normal phases) using correlative modelling approaches. This study used climatic (i.e., annual precipitation, SPI, and KBDI), biophysical (i.e., below-ground biomass, elevation, slope, and NBR), and proxies to anthropogenic disturbance variables (i.e., access to road, access to forests, access to cities, human modification, and human population) to assess fire vulnerability within Sumatran peatlands. We created an ensemble model based on various machine learning approaches (i.e., random forest, support vector machine, maximum entropy, and boosted regression tree). We found that the ensemble model performed better compared to a single algorithm for depicting fire vulnerability within Sumatran peatlands. The NBR highly contributed to the vulnerability of peatland to fire in Sumatra in all ENSO phases, followed by the anthropogenic variables. We found that the high to very-high peat vulnerability to fire increases during El-Nino conditions with variations in its spatial patterns occurring under different ENSO phases. This study provides spatially explicit information to support the management of peat fires, which will be particularly useful for identifying peatland restoration priorities based on peatland vulnerability to fire maps. Our findings highlight Riau’s peatland as being the area most prone to fires area on Sumatra Island. Therefore, the groundwater level within this area should be intensively monitored to prevent peatland fires. In addition, conserving intact forests within peatland through the moratorium strategy and restoring the degraded peatland ecosystem through canal blocking is also crucial to coping with global climate change. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Investigation of the Causes of Forest Fires and Post-fire Prevention and Recovery)
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21 pages, 3733 KiB  
Article
Forest Fire Causes and Motivations in the Southern and South-Eastern Europe through Experts’ Perception and Applications to Current Policies
by Fantina Tedim, Vittorio Leone, Raffaella Lovreglio, Gavriil Xanthopoulos, María-Luisa Chas-Amil, Anne Ganteaume, Recep Efe, Dominic Royé, Borna Fuerst-Bjeliš, Nikola Nikolov, Snjezana Musa, Milan Milenković, Fernando Correia, Marco Conedera and Gianni Boris Pezzatti
Forests 2022, 13(4), 562; https://doi.org/10.3390/f13040562 - 31 Mar 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4849
Abstract
Forest fires causes and motivations are poorly understood in southern and south-eastern Europe. This research aims to identify how experts perceive the different causes of forest fires as defined in the classification proposed by the European Commission in 2013. A panel of experts [...] Read more.
Forest fires causes and motivations are poorly understood in southern and south-eastern Europe. This research aims to identify how experts perceive the different causes of forest fires as defined in the classification proposed by the European Commission in 2013. A panel of experts (N = 271) was gathered from the EU Southern Member States (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) and from Central (Switzerland) and south-eastern Europe (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of North Macedonia, and Turkey). Experts were asked to answer a questionnaire to score the importance of the 29 fire causes using a five point (1–5) Likert Scale. Agricultural burnings received the highest score, followed by Deliberate fire for profit, and Vegetation management. Most of the events stem from Negligence, whereas malicious fire setting is arguably overestimated although there are differences among the countries. This research demonstrates the importance of different techniques to enhance the knowledge of the causes of the complex anthropogenic phenomenon of forest fire occurrence. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Investigation of the Causes of Forest Fires and Post-fire Prevention and Recovery)
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17 pages, 7602 KiB  
Article
Combining Methods to Estimate Post-Fire Soil Erosion Using Remote Sensing Data
by Ilenia Argentiero, Giovanni Francesco Ricci, Mario Elia, Marina D’Este, Vincenzo Giannico, Francesco Vito Ronco, Francesco Gentile and Giovanni Sanesi
Forests 2021, 12(8), 1105; https://doi.org/10.3390/f12081105 - 18 Aug 2021
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2246
Abstract
The increasing number of wildfires in southern Europe is making our ecosystem more vulnerable to water erosion; i.e., the loss of vegetation and subsequent runoff increase cause a shift in large quantities of sediment. Fire severity has been recognized as one of the [...] Read more.
The increasing number of wildfires in southern Europe is making our ecosystem more vulnerable to water erosion; i.e., the loss of vegetation and subsequent runoff increase cause a shift in large quantities of sediment. Fire severity has been recognized as one of the most important parameters controlling the magnitude of post-fire soil erosion. In this paper, we adopted a combination of methods to easily assess post-fire erosion and prevent potential risk in subsequent rain events. The model presented is structured into three modules that were implemented in a GIS environment. The first module estimates fire severity with the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) method; the second estimates runoff with rainfall depth–duration curves and the Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS-CN) method; and the third estimates pre- and post-fire soil erosion. In addition, two post-fire scenarios were analyzed to assess the influence of fire severity on soil erosion: the former based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the latter on the Relative differenced Normalized Burn Index (RdNBR). The results obtained in both scenarios are quite similar and demonstrate that transitional areas, such as rangelands and rangelands with bush, are the most vulnerable because they show a significant increase in erosion following a fire event. The study findings are of secondary importance to the combined approach devised because the focal point of the study is to create the basis for a future tool to facilitate decision making in landscape management. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Investigation of the Causes of Forest Fires and Post-fire Prevention and Recovery)
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