Brigite Botequim

University of Lisbon | UL · Forest Research Center (CEF)

Climate change is driving worldwide efforts to mitigate and reverse the increasing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Forests can uptake considerable amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, but management decisions and resultant silvicultural practices can largely influence these ecosystems’ carbon balance. This research presents an approa...

Portugal enfrenta um problema estrutural relacionado com o desenvolvimento e a gestão das áreas rurais, agravado pelos efeitos das alterações climáticas. Os incêndios rurais são uma das consequências deste problema, representando uma séria ameaça à segurança das comunidades, à economia florestal, ao ambiente e ao desenvolvimento económico e social...

The Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) provides an extraordinary opportunity to support global large-scale forest carbon mapping, but further research is needed in order to obtain wall-to-wall forest aboveground biomass (AGB) maps with this technology. The effects of vegetation structure on the performance of canopy height and AG...

Determinadas características estructurales de las comunidades de matorral, como la altura del complejo y la carga de combustible, afectan considerablemente al comportamiento del fuego. Por lo tanto, contar con una cartografía de estas variables, elaborada a partir de sensores remotos, puede suponer un gran avance en el uso de simuladores de comport...

Remotely sensed data are increasingly used together with National Forest Inventory (NFI) data to improve the spatial precision of forest variable estimates. In this study, we combined data from the 4th Spanish National Forest Inventory (SNFI-4) and from the 2nd nationwide Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) survey to develop predictive forest inventory v...

Background Soil erosion is still identified as the main cause of land degradation worldwide, threatening soil functions and driving several research and policy efforts to reverse it. Trees are commonly associated to some of the most successful land-use systems to achieve soil protection goals, but the extent to which forest ecosystems reduce erosio...

Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) satellite mission is expanding the spatial bounds and temporal resolution of large-scale mapping applications. Integrating the recent GEDI data into Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS)-derived estimations represents a global opportunity to update and extend forest models based on area based approaches (ABA)...

Sustainable forest management needs to address biodiversity conservation concerns. For that purpose, forest managers need models and indicators that may help evaluate the impact of management options on biodiversity under the uncertainty of climate change scenarios. In this research we explore the potential for designing mosaics of stand-level fore...

Europe's forests provide vital habitat for biodiversity and essential ecosystem services whose provision must be sustained or enhanced over the coming century. However, the potential to secure or increase forest ecosystem services, while securing the habitat requirements of taxa remains unclear, especially within the context of uncertain climate an...

Background Climate change may strongly influence soil erosion risk, namely through variations in the precipitation pattern. Forests may contribute to mitigate the impacts of climate change on soil erosion and forest managers are thus challenged by the need to define strategies that may protect the soil while addressing the demand for other ecosyste...

In this paper, we present a web-based decision support system (DSS)—wSADfLOR—to facilitate the access of stakeholders to tools that may contribute to enhancing forest management planning. The emphasis is on a web-based architecture and a web graphic user interface (wGUI) that may effectively support the analysis of trade-offs between ecosystem serv...

Estimating forest inventory variables is important in monitoring forest resources and mitigating climate change. In this respect, forest managers require flexible, non-destructive methods for estimating volume and biomass. High-resolution and low-cost remote sensing data are increasingly available to measure three-dimensional (3D) canopy structure...

Forest inventory and management requirements are changing rapidly in the context of an increasingly complex set of economic, environmental, and social policy objectives. Nowadays, forest inventories on the landscape scale can be obtained with three-dimensional and mostly high-resolution remote-sensing techniques, such as LiDAR and other aerial s...

Wildfires cause substantial environmental and socioeconomic impacts and threaten many Spanish forested landscapes. We describe how LiDAR-derived canopy fuel characteristics and spatial fire simulation can be integrated with stand metrics to derive models describing fire behaviour. We assessed the potential use of very-low-density airborne LiDAR (li...

Motivation and objective: Because biodiversity conservation in forest management planning is necessary for ensuring regular ecosystem functioning, resilience and sustainability, the specific objective of this research was to quantify biodiversity at the landscape level in a forest plantation. Case study: Vale de Sousa, Forest Intervention Zone (ZIF...

After the catastrophic wildfires in 2017, it was critical to explore the needs for alternative forest management (aFMMs) over 14,840 ha in the Vale do Sousa case study area (CSA), located at the North‐Western Portugal, namely as a landscape management planning between Entre-Douro-e-Sousa (north of the Douro river) and Paiva (south of the Douro rive...

Forest fires are the main threat to many Spanish forests landscapes with significant environmental and socio-economic impacts. Here we describe how LiDAR-canopy fuel description and spatial-fire simulation can be integrated with stand descriptors into a regression exercise to derive models describing fire potential. This research aims in a first st...

Desafios prioritários que se colocam ao nível da gestão do Pós-fogo na construção de uma nova Paisagem Reflexões sobre o plano de corte e enquadramento num desenho florestal futuro desejável O desenho da Paisagem Florestal como instrumento de valorização do território das Matas do Litoral Reflexões sobre possíveis abordagens metodológicas de des...

Silvicultural models are often developed and applied without due consideration of fire modelling. Yet, this information is important for designing treatment options to lower fire hazard. We used the FlamMap software to assess potential fire behaviour under extreme fire weather conditions within a 10,881-ha maritime pine landscape in central Portugal, t...

Assessing impacts of management strategies may allow designing more resistant forests to wildfires. Planning-oriented models to predict the effect of stand structure and forest composition on mortality for supporting fire-smart management decisions, and allowing its inclusion in forest management optimization systems were developed. Post-fire morta...

For forest sustainability and vulnerability assessment, the landscape scale is considered to be more and more relevant as the stand level approaches its known limitations. This review, which describes the main forest landscape simulation tools used in the 20 European case studies of the European project " Future-oriented integrated management of Eu...

Aim of study: This study was conducted to support fire and forest management planning in eucalypt plantations based on economic, ecological and fire prevention criteria, with a focus on strategic prioritisation of fuel treatments over time. The central objective was to strategically locate fuel treatments to minimise losses from wildfire while meet...

Silviculture prevention planning is a complex and dynamic instrument implying knowledge about the strategic localization of fuel treatments. This study aims to support fire and forest management planning in eucalyptus plantations with economic, ecological and fire prevention criteria, focusing on strategically prioritizing fuel treatment into spati...

While sustainable forestry in Europe is characterized by the provision of a multitude of forest ecosystem services, there exists no comprehensive study that scrutinizes their sensitivity to forest management on a pan-European scale, so far. We compile scenario runs from regionally tailored forest growth models and Decision Support Systems (DSS) fro...

Abstract: The evaluation of forest fuel loading is required by most fire management activities. However, the consideration of shrub biomass for forest planning purposes has been limited by the inability to predict its growth and accumulation. The main objective of this study was to model shrub biomass over time under a tree canopy to be able to inc...

Addressing sustainability concerns in Mediterranean forest ecosystems management with the growing incidence of fires impacting the forest areas over the past decades is a complex task. The current framework was driven taking into account several decision support tools of the United States Wildfire Modeling System for wildfire risk management, which...

Assessment of forest fuel loading is a prerequisite for most fire management activities. However, the inclusion of shrub biomass in forest planning has been hindered by the inability to predict its growth and accumulation. The main objective of this study was to model shrub biomass over time under a tree canopy with the aim of including shrub manag...

Os fogos florestais são uma calamidade que tem aumentado consideravelmente nas últimas décadas, também em Portugal, com consequências importantes ao nível económico, social e ambiental. É imprescindível, para a escolha e aplicação de políticas de intervenção efectivas neste problema, que se consiga perceber quais os factores que mais contribuem par...

www.istpress.ist.utl.pt/lmatematica_planeta_terra.htm

Muito antes do aparecimento do Homem na Terra já vários acontecimentos geofísicos como cheias, sismos, secas, etc. ocorriam, ameaçando a fauna e flora existente então. Passado bastante tempo a presença humana transformou estes acontecimentos geofísicos em desastres/catástrofes naturais. O nosso planeta é cenário de vários processos dinâmicos como o...

This paper presents a model to predict annual wildfire risk in pure and even-aged eucalypt stands in Portugal. Emphasis was in developing a management-oriented model, i.e. a model that might both: a) help assess wildfire occurrence probability as a function of readily available forest inventory data and b) help predict the effects of management opt...

Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Ait.) is an important conifer from the western Mediterranean Basin. Maritime pine stands extend over 22% of the forest area in Portugal. In average, up to 266,640 ha of the Maritime pine area have been burned by wildfires in the period from 1997 to 2007 in this country. Yet no wildfire occurrence probability models are...

Wildfire is the most severe threat to Portuguese forests. It is widely accepted that the most cost-effective means for reducing wildfire incidence is by prevention. However, no wildfire probability models are available linking biometric data (that may be controllable by forest managers) with fire risk. This study presents a model that could contrib...

Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Ait.) is an important conifer from the western Mediterranean Basin extending over 22% of the forest area in Portugal. In the last three decades nearly 4% of Maritime pine area has been burned by wildfires. Yet no wildfire occurrence probability models are available and forest and fire management planning activities are...

Forest fires severity has increased in Portugal in the last decades. Climate change scenarios suggest the reinforcement of this severity. Forest ecosystem managers and policy-makers thus face the challenge of developing effective fire prevention policies. The characterization of forest fires is instrumental for meeting this challenge. An approach f...

Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Ait) is a very important timber-producing species in Portugal with a yield of ∼67.1 million m3 year−1. It covers ∼22.6 per cent of the forest area (710.6 × 103 ha). Fire is the most significant threat to maritime pine plantations. This paper discusses research aiming at the development of post-fire mortality models for...

2011. Developing post-fire Eucalyptus globulus stand damage and tree mortality models for enhanced forest planning in Portugal. Silva Fennica 45(1): 69–83. Forest and fire management planning activities are carried out mostly independently of each other. This paper discusses research aiming at the development of methods and tools that can be used f...

Wildfires have a substantial impact on forest landscape composition and constrain the economic viability of maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Ait) in the Portuguese commercial forestry. A set of explanatory variables from Leiria National Forest (10 881 ha), an even-aged maritime pine public forest, related to geographical information and non-spatial in...