Determinantes ambientais de alguns padrões espaciais de fogo em regiões de tipo mediterrânico

Abstract

Fire provides a fundamental ecological function to many ecosystems. Nevertheless, in the past decades, the occurrence of very large, severe fires, has called for attention from managers, scientists and society in general. Understanding fire drivers constitutes an important step to identify regions of higher risk, establish priorities for protection, and manage the landscape to increase its fire resilience. The main goal of the present work is to explore relationships between fire, vegetation, topography and meteorology at landscape scale. It applies principal component analysis and circular statistics to determine the existence of spatial patterns in fire perimeter orientation, in two mediterranean climate regions, relying on a 31-year fire atlas for Portugal and 100-year fire atlas for California. Additionally it applies quantile regression to evaluate the relationship between fire size and fire selectivity towards different land cover types, in Portugal. The results presented here reinforce the importance of meteorological conditions as the primary driver of fire spread, at landscape scale and in the regions considered.