Post-Fire Management and Restoration of Southern European Forests
In spite of all the efforts made in fire prevention and suppression, every year about 45 000 forest fires occur in Europe, burning ca. 0.5 million hectares of forests and other rural lands. The management of these burned forests has been given much less a
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Setting the Scene for Post-Fire Management Francisco Moreira, Margarita Arianoutsou, V. Ramón Vallejo, Jorge de las Heras, Piermaria Corona, Gavriil Xanthopoulos, Paulo Fernandes, and Kostas Papageorgiou
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Introduction
Every year, around 45,000 wildfires occur in Europe, burning an area of 0.5 million hectares (San-Miguel and Camia 2009). Between 1995 and 2004, more than four million hectares were burned in the Mediterranean region alone, corresponding to an area larger than the Netherlands. In addition to social and environmental impacts, wildfires also produce considerable economic damages due to: (i) the huge amount of resources spent in fire suppression and prevention; (ii) the loss of commercial value of damaged wood products; (iii) the costs related to loss of public non-market services (i.e., biodiversity protection, water cycle regulation, supply of recreational areas, soil protection, carbon sequestration, etc.).
F. Moreira (*) Centre of Applied Ecology, Institute of Agronomy, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] M. Arianoutsou Faculty of Biology, Department of Ecology and Systematics, School of Sciences, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece V.R. Vallejo Fundacion CEAM, Parque Tecnologico, Paterna, Spain J. de las Heras Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieros Agronomos, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain P. Corona Department for Innovation in Biological, Agro-Food and Forest Systems, University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy
F. Moreira et al. (eds.), Post-Fire Management and Restoration of Southern European Forests, Managing Forest Ecosystems 24, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2208-8_1, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
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F. Moreira et al.
The post-fire management of burned areas has been given much less attention than fire suppression and prevention in Europe and elsewhere. However, important questions raise public concern and require scientifically-based knowledge: how can we accurately evaluate fire damages in economic terms? What are the most suitable short-term intervention techniques to minimise soil erosion and runoff? How should burned trees be managed? What is the best approach to long-term planning for the rehabilitation of burned areas? Along side the damage they incur, wildfires can also be regarded as an opportunity to plan and establish less flammable and more resilient forests and landscapes in recently burned areas. What information is available on these topics and how should administrations and stakeholders react after large fires? These questions are relevant not only in a southern European perspective, where wildfires are more frequent, but all over Europe. In fact, climate change and land-use trends are expected to increase fire incidence in Central and Northern Europe (Lindner et al. 2010), and new geographical areas (and forest ecosystems) where wildfires were infrequent are likely to become more fire-prone. Thus, further knowledge is needed on how to manage the millions of hectares burned in Eu
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