Assessing public preferences for a wildfire mitigation policy in Crete, Greece

The increased frequency and severity of wildfires in the Mediterranean region generates significant damages in ecosystems and landscapes while harming human populations. Institutional complexities, along with socioeconomic and demographic changes encouraging development into the wildland-urban interface, rural abandonment, and focus on fire suppression, are increasing the vulnerability and flammability of Mediterranean ecosystems. Developing effective strategies for managing wildfire incidence and its aftermath requires understanding of the public preferences for wildfire policy characteristics. Here we elicit public preferences for wildfire mitigation policies employing a stated choice experiment applied in Crete, Greece. A region with typical Mediterranean landscape experiencing significant development and rural-to-urban migration that disrupts existing fire regimes. We estimate conditional logit, mixed logit and latent class models to study the general public's preferences and willingness to pay for limiting wildfire frequency and agricultural land burnt, maintaining landscape features, and managing post-wildfire recovery. Results of our study show that measures to manage post-wildfire damage are consistently valued as the most positive amongst the sampled respondents, achieving values that range between €25.92 in conditional logit model to €46 in one of the latent classes identified. Improving the landscape quality follows in importance, although it shows more heterogeneity in the responses. The latent class approach allowed to identify that those associated with either the agricultural or the tourism sector of the sampled individuals, displayed significantly different preferences for the proposed attributes. Overall, our findings indicate that there is a strong preference amongst the general public to shift current policies based on suppression towards more integrated approaches dealing both with prevention and post-fire management. The outcomes of this study serve to guide decision makers on targeted management plans based on their audience

Climate drivers of global wildfire burned area

Wildfire is an integral part of the Earth system, but at the same time it can pose serious threats to human society and to certain types of terrestrial ecosystems. Meteorological conditions are a key driver of wildfire activity and extent, which led to the emergence of the use of fire danger indices that depend solely on weather conditions. The Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) is a widely used fire danger index of this kind. Here, we evaluate how well the FWI, its components, and the climate variables from which it is derived, correlate with observation-based burned area (BA) for a variety of world regions. We use a novel technique, according to which monthly BA are grouped by size for each Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) pyrographic region. We find strong correlations of BA anomalies with the FWI anomalies, as well as with the underlying deviations from their climatologies for the four climate variables from which FWI is estimated, namely, temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, and wind. We quantify the relative sensitivity of the observed BA to each of the four climate variables, finding that this relationship strongly depends on the pyrographic region and land type. Our results indicate that the BA anomalies strongly correlate with FWI anomalies at a GFED region scale, compared to the strength of the correlation with individual climate variables. Additionally, among the individual climate variables that comprise the FWI, relative humidity and temperature are the most influential factors that affect the observed BA. Our results support the use of the composite fire danger index FWI, as well as its sub-indices, the Build-Up Index (BUI) and the Initial Spread Index (ISI), comparing to single climate variables, since they are found to correlate better with the observed forest or non-forest BA, for the most regions across the globe

Operational Space Prescribed Tracking Performance and Compliance in Flexible Joint Robots

In this work, an admittance control scheme is proposed utilizing a highly robust prescribed performance position tracking controller for flexible joint robots which is designed at the operational space. The proposed control scheme achieves the desired impedance to the external contact force as well as superior position tracking in free motion without any robot model knowledge, as opposed to the torque based impedance controllers. Comparative simulation results on a three degrees-of-freedom (3DOF) flexible joint manipulator, illustrate the efficiency of the approach