Regional fire scenarios in Spain: Linking landscape dynamics and fire regime for wildfire risk management.

ABSTRACT

Fire scenarios are multiscale land-type planning units for a fire regime with different applications at national, regional, and local scales. The main aim of this research is to implement a methodology integrating landscape dynamics and wildfire risk from a context-specific approach, to identify current fire scenarios at a regional scale in the Spanish Central Mountain Range. These homogeneous areas are linked to different stages of a territorial dynamics model called wildfire generations and related to land use diversity and land management trends. A place-based methodology has been developed to characterize fire scenarios using Geographic Information Systems and statistical analysis, resulting in analytical and diagnostic mapping that can be used as a decision support tool for spatial planning and wildfire risk management. Its implementation has led to the delimitation of 91 discrete geographic units in the Central Mountain Range, classified according to wildfire generations and land use-land cover criteria. In conclusion, the fire scenarios concept is a potential approach to manage uncertainty by moving from the operational level of fire suppression to the strategic level of integrated fire management.