40 research outputs found
Um Programa de Investigação Interdisciplinar sobre Incêndios Florestais
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Rural Fires: Causes of Human Losses in the 2017 Fires in Portugal
Extreme wildfires are increasingly rising to intense and uncontrolled fires, with dimension
and destructive potentials that are greater than what has been seen and dealt with. The hazards
posed by these fires increase significantly when they approach the wild–urban interface, with relevant
environmental and socio-economic consequences. The 2009 Victorian bushfires and the 2017 Portugal
wildfires are powerful reminders, and they have demonstrated the need to better understand why
mitigation plans have failed to protect the community in these events and to improve community
resilience. The year 2017 is a milestone in the history of wildfires in Portugal, not only because of the
vast burned area but also due to the high number of fatalities. The two occurrences were at different
times (June and October) but were geographically close (region of centre of Portugal). A total of
117 deaths occurred in both events and 92% of the victims were in wild–urban interface areas. This
paper analyses and discusses the characteristics and causes of death of the victims of these two events:
age, place of death, distance from place of death to place of residence and last-minute choices to
aim to understand the actions that people took in the face of the approaching fire, which led to their
death. In both cases, most people died fleeing the fire without any information from the competent
authorities. In the end, it is possible to identify risk factors that lead to the death of civilians due
to wildfires, such as the increase in demand for rurality by young people from big cities with no
previous contact with wildfires; on the other hand, there is the ageing of the population residing in
forest areas, who were previously physically and structurally prepared to deal with fires and are
currently no longer able to.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Fire danger harmonization based on the fire weather index for transboundary events between Portugal and Spain
Portugal and Spain have a cross-border cooperation protocol on wildfires response for a buffer strip of 25 km for each side of the border. In spite of the success of this collaboration, there are issues to be improved, since Portuguese and Spanish authorities use different methodologies to assess the daily fire danger. A methodology to harmonize fire danger and its interpretation by the Portuguese and Spanish Civil protection authorities in the transboundary buffer strip area is hereby presented. The fire danger index used is the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), which requires input from meteorological data and gives an indication of fire intensity. The fire danger class is an important decision support tool for preventing and fighting wildfires. Since the meaning of FWI values change from region-to-region according to its specific characteristics, a calibration process was performed based on statistical data of the daily FWI values, the number of fires and burned area between 2005 and 2013. The results of the FWI calibration and harmonization of the data for the five danger classes minimizes the fire danger discrepancies across the border. This methodology has the potential to be reproduced in other areas
Contributions to forecasting and preparedness
UIDB/04209/2020 UIDP/04209/2020 GFC/0109/2017Available research has extensively examined the spatiotemporal patterns of fire-weather regime in Portugal, but a comprehensive climatology of extreme wildfires is still under development. This study calls for different strategies and scales of analysis aiming to describe the relationships between medium and low troposphere weather conditions and severe fire behaviour in mainland Portugal, between 1980 and 2018. In particular, critical fire-weather patterns and thresholds that can contribute to operational and forecasting know-how in short and medium time ranges are presented. We updated the general trends in the fire regime with a new, longer daily burned area series and developed a method that identifies Extreme Wildfire Periods (EWP) that form the basis for climate analysis. Synoptic analysis using Circulation Weather Types (CWT) showed that the northeasterly and easterly directional flows are significantly associated with EWP and produce the most severe fire-weather conditions. The four main CWT related to extreme fire are driven from anticyclones over the eastern Atlantic between the Azores and the British Isles. However, severe situations can also be regulated by CWT with marginal presence in both summer and EWP: low systems located to the west and northwest of Iberia carrying air masses from the south quadrant are related to catastrophic events. Regarding the antecedent climate, the results indicate that the coincident meteorological drought, whether weak or intense, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of an EWP. An increasing relevance of water stress for shorter intervals preceding EWP, in the order of days and weeks, is apparent. Following these results, fine dead fuel moisture thresholds related to transitions in fire behaviour in Portuguese landscapes are computed using a promising predictive moisture content model. Finally, the different methods used are summoned for the detailed analysis of an EWP starting under unusual synoptic circulation.publishersversionpublishe
Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research
Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4
While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge
of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8–11 In
the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world’s most diverse rainforest and the primary source of
Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepre sented in biodiversity databases.13–15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may elim inate pieces of the Amazon’s biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological com munities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus
crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced
environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple or ganism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian
Amazonia, while identifying the region’s vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most ne glected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by
2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status,
much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lostinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio