Landscape--wildfire interactions in southern Europe: implications for landscape management.

Every year approximately half a million hectares of land are burned by wildfires in southern Europe, causing large ecological and socio-economic impacts. Climate and land use changes in the last decades have increased fire risk and danger. In this paper we review the available scientific knowledge on the relationships between landscape and wildfires in the Mediterranean region, with a focus on its application for defining landscape management guidelines and policies that could be adopted in order to promote landscapes with lower fire hazard. The main findings are that (1) socio-economic drivers have favoured land cover changes contributing to increasing fire hazard in the last decades, (2) large wildfires are becoming more frequent, (3) increased fire frequency is promoting homogeneous landscapes covered by fire-prone shrublands; (4) landscape planning to reduce fuel loads may be successful only if fire weather conditions are not extreme. The challenges to address these problems and the policy and landscape management responses that should be adopted are discussed, along with major knowledge gaps.

A comparison of Spectral Angle Mapper and Artificial Neural Network classifiers combined with Landsat TM imagery analysis for obtaining burnt area mapping.

Satellite remote sensing, with its unique synoptic coverage capabilities, can provide accurate and immediately valuable information on fire analysis and post-fire assessment, including estimation of burnt areas. In this study the potential for burnt area mapping of the combined use of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) classifiers with Landsat TM satellite imagery was evaluated in a Mediterranean setting. As a case study one of the most catastrophic forest fires, which occurred near the capital of Greece during the summer of 2007, was used. The accuracy of the two algorithms in delineating the burnt area from the Landsat TM imagery, acquired shortly after the fire suppression, was determined by the classification accuracy results of the produced thematic maps. In addition, the derived burnt area estimates from the two classifiers were compared with independent estimates available for the study region, obtained from the analysis of higher spatial resolution satellite data. In terms of the overall classification accuracy, ANN outperformed (overall accuracy 90.29%, Kappa coefficient 0.878) the SAM classifier (overall accuracy 83.82%, Kappa coefficient 0.795). Total burnt area estimates from the two classifiers were found also to be in close agreement with the other available estimates for the study region, with a mean absolute percentage difference of ≈ 1% for ANN and ≈ 6.5% for SAM. The study demonstrates the potential of the examined here algorithms in detecting burnt areas in a typical Mediterranean setting.

Vulnerability of peri­urban and residential areas to landscape fires in Greece: Evidence by wildland-urban interface data.

We provide a map of wildland urban interface (WUI) areas at national scale in Greece, using as primary data the Corine Land Cover (CLC) 2018 product. The WUI areas distribution in Greece is calculated for all the regional units of the county. The regional units correspond to NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) level 2 for Greece, being important for the national to regional fire risk management and mitigation within the country. Furthermore, spatially explicit information regarding the fire affected areas and the changes in WUI areas between 2006 and 2018 on the basis of the CLC data for each regional unit is also provided. This geospatial information can provide valuable, concurrent information at no-cost to all responsible and competent authorities involved in landscape fire management in Greece and represent a valuable contribution to assist in national and regional scale planning.