Wildfire management in Mediterranean-type regions: paradigm change needed

PerspectiveDuring the last decades, climate and land use changes led to an increased prevalence ofmegafires in Mediterranean-type climate regions (MCRs).Here, we argue that current wildfire management policies in MCRs are destined to fail.Focused on fire suppression, these policies largely ignore ongoing climate warming and landscape-scale buildup of fuels.The result is a ‘firefighting trap’ that contributes to ongoing fuel accumulation precluding suppression under extreme fire weather, and resulting in more severe and larger fires.We believe that a ‘business as usual’ approach to wildfire in MCRs will not solve the fire problem, and recommend that policy and expenditures be rebalanced between suppression and mitigation of the negative impacts of fire.This requires a paradigm shift: policy effectiveness should not be primarily measured as a function of area burned (as it usually is), but rather as a function of avoided socio-ecological damage and lossinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A role for airborne laser scanning data in vertical stratification of multilayered ecosystems

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) based height and intensity information was exploited for the vertical stratification of vegetation layers in a multilayered Mediterranean ecosystem. A new methodology for the separation of different strata was implemented using supervised classification of a two-dimensional feature space spanned by ALS return height (terrain corrected) and discrete return intensity. The approach was validated using extensive field measurements from treated plots, ranging from a single vegetation strata to a more complex multi-layered ecosystem. It was possible to derive maximum, minimum and mean layer height with satisfying accuracies, the bias between field and ALS based layer properties being in order of some decimetres, while standard deviation were generally less than a meter. Fractional cover of the layers could be estimated with errors of about 10 to 15%, even for lower layers potentially concealed by higher vegetation. Concluding, ALS based height and intensity information based on discrete return data was found to be well suited to derive vertical stratification of vegetation layers, however full-waveform data should be able to provide additional information on the physical properties of these layers