José M.C. Pereira

• Ph.D.
• Full Professor at University of Lisbon

Biomass burning in the Brazilian Amazon is modulated by climate factors, such as droughts, and by human factors, such as deforestation and land management activities. The increase in forest fires during drought years has led to the hypothesis that fire activity decoupled from deforestation during the twenty-first century. However, assessment of the...

Daily global burned area mapping of Earth from remotely sensed data is of considerable interest and indicates a clear user need, despite well-known accuracy limitations. Many studies report global and regional indicators of spatial and temporal accuracy to evaluate the quality of burned area products, but tend to rely on relatively sparse validatio...

Highlights d We modeled spatially optimized fuel management scenarios d The treatments targeted ignition frequency, large fires, and building exposure d Substantial trade-offs were observed among the three treatment objectives d The results downscale national policy objectives to site-specific treatments In brief European countries that are beginni...

Background. In African savannas, the most intense fires occur during the late dry season, when fuel availability is high and atmospheric relative humidity low. The Fire Weather Index (FWI) system has been used to measure the effort required for fire suppression and explore the impact of climate on fires. Aims. This study assesses trends in FWI sys...

Fire databases typically contain information regarding the location, timing, and duration of fire occurrences, as well as the cause (natural or human-induced). These databases allow for the analysis and understanding of the circumstances surrounding the ignition and propagation of wildfires, being highly relevant when addressing fire suppression an...

Wildfires have been progressively shrinking the C sink capacity of forest accelerating climate change effects on forest biodiversity, especially where megafires are recurrent and of increased frequency such as in the Mediterranean. Data from The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission can inform on changes on forest structure to info...

The increasing availability of remote sensing imagery led to the emergence of numerous burned area mapping products and methodologies, thus, the necessity of spatial and temporally validating them. The main objective of this paper is to conduct a global analysis and comparison of MODIS and VIIRS active fire dates with dating provided by moderate re...

Background The global human footprint has fundamentally altered wildfire regimes, creating serious consequences for human health, biodiversity, and climate. However, it remains difficult to project how long-term interactions among land use, management, and climate change will affect fire behavior, representing a key knowledge gap for sustainable ma...

Background The study of wildfire interactions (i.e., spread limitation and reburns) is gaining traction as a means of describing the self-limiting process of fire spread in the landscape and has important management implications but has scarcely been attempted in Europe. We examined to what extent previously burned areas restricted the development...

FIRELAN was developed as a model expected to foster the resilience to fire and sustainability of a landscape that is based on a number of premises about fire behaviour. We critically review FIRELAN and find that flawed ecological concepts and terminology are used, and that six fallacies are pervasive throughout the paper, namely “begging the questi...

Wildfire behaviour depends on complex interactions between fuels, topography, and weather over a wide range of scales, being important for fire research and management applications. To allow for significant progress towards better fire management, the operational and research communities require detailed open data on observed wildfire behaviour. He...

Wildfires burn millions of hectares of forest worldwide every year and this trend is expected to continue growing under current and future climate scenarios. As a result, accurate knowledge of fuel condition and fuel type mapping are important for assessing fire hazard and predicting fire behaviour. In this study 499 plots in 6 different areas in P...

Crown fire damage is a mixture of three principal fire-related components: charred material, scorched foliage, and unaltered green canopy. This study estimated the abundance of these physical alterations in two immediate post-fire Mediterranean forest contexts (Portugal and Italy) by applying linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA) on Sentinel-2 im...

We present a statistical model with 8 parameters that combines three components, namely a truncated lognormal distribution central body with a lower and an upper tail, both consisting of Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions. We fit the model to a dataset of more than 85 million records of the logarithm of fire radiative power (FRP) at the global s...

Wildfire behaviour depends on complex interactions between fuels, topography and weather, over a wide range of scales, being important for fire research and management applications. To allow for a significant progress towards better fire management, the operational and research communities require detailed open data on observed wildfire behaviour....

Background The Iberian Peninsula is recurrently affected by severe wildfires resulting from an interplay of human activities, landscape features and atmospheric conditions. Aims The role played by atmospheric conditions on wildfire activity in 2001–2020 is assessed in four pyroregions of the Iberian Peninsula. Methods Wildfire activity is charact...

Fire spread behavior models are used to estimate fire behavior metrics, fire hazard, exposure, and risk across the landscape. One of the most widely used fire spread models is the minimum travel time (MTT), which requires a very time-consuming, interactive, trial-and-error calibration process to reproduce observed fire regimens. This study presents...

Background The study of wildfire interactions (i.e., spread limitation and reburns) is gaining traction as a means of describing the self-limiting process of fire spread in the landscape and has important management implications but has not been attempted in Europe. We examined to what extent previously burned areas restricted the development of la...

Simulation of vegetation fires very often resorts to fire-behavior models that need fuel models as input. The lack of fuel models is a common problem for researchers and fire managers because its quality depends on the quality/availability of data. In this study we present a method that combines expert- and research-based knowledge with several sou...

Portugal is the most fire-prone country in Southern Europe. Time series of satellite imagery have great potential to improve fire mapping and explore the spatiotemporal trends of burned areas. Thus, the objectives of this work were to disaggregate the Portuguese Annual Fire Atlas burned area patches into individual events according to their date of...

Human activity has fundamentally altered wildfire on Earth, creating serious consequences for human health, global biodiversity, and climate change. However, it remains difficult to predict fire interactions with land use, management, and climate change, representing a serious knowledge gap and vulnerability. We used expert assessment to combine op...

Wildfire behaviour depends on complex interactions between fuels, topography and weather, over a wide range of scales, being important for fire research and management applications. To allow for a significant progress towards better fire management, the operational and research communities require detailed open data on observed wildfire behaviour....

This study aims to assess wildfire hazard in northern Portugal by combining landscape-scale wildfire spread modeling and connectivity analysis to help fuel management planning. We used the Minimum Travel Time (MTT) algorithm to run simulations under extreme (95th percentile) fire weather conditions. We assessed wildfire hazard through burn probabil...

Climate change is drastically altering the frequency, duration, and severity of compound drought‐heatwave (CDHW) episodes, which present a new challenge in environmental and socioeconomic sectors. These threats are of particular importance in low‐income regions with growing populations, fragile infrastructure, and threatened ecosystems. This review...

Despite growing interest in developing extensive fuel treatment programs to prevent catastrophic wildfires in the Mediterranean region, there is little information on the projected effectiveness of fuel treatments in terms of avoided exposure and risk. In Portugal, a fuel management plan aiming to prevent loss of lives, reduce large fires (>500 ha)...

The impacts of wildfires are increasing in the Mediterranean Basin due to more extreme fire seasons featuring increasingly fast and high-intensity fires, which often overwhelm the response capacity of fire suppression forces. Fire behaviour is expected to become even more severe due to climate change. In this study, we quantified the effect of clim...

Climate and natural vegetation dynamics are key drivers of global vegetation fire, but anthropogenic burning now prevails over vast areas of the planet. Fire regime classification and mapping may contribute towards improved understanding of relationships between those fire drivers. We used 15 years of daily active fire data from the MODIS fire prod...

Prescribed burning (PB) is increasingly recognised as a viable, cost-effective technique for reducing wildfire risk. Yet, quantification of the effect of PB on the reduction of wildfire extent in southern Europe is non-existent. We used 35 years of fire mapping data in Portugal to analyse wildfire regime metrics in nine landscapes before (1985–2004...

This study aims to assess wildfire hazard in northern Portugal by combining landscape-scale wildfire spread modelling and connectivity analysis to help fuel management planning. We used the Minimum Travel Time (MTT) algorithm to run simulations under extreme (95th percentile) fire weather conditions. We assessed wildfire hazard through burn probabi...

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The recent extreme wildfire events in the Mediterranean region overwhelmed fire suppression capabilities of national authorities, evidencing the need for a paradigm shift in forest and wildfire management. Wildfire spread and behaviour simulations can provide relevant information to assess fire hazard and to guide decision-makers in implementing fu...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

O período entre 2018 e 2022 mostrou-nos que o problema dos incêndios à escala global não está a diminuir, antes pelo contrário. Parece que as consequências das alterações climáticas já estão a afectar a ocorrência de incêndios florestais em várias partes do Mundo, de uma forma que só esperaríamos que acontecesse vários anos mais tarde. Em muitos pa...

The impacts of wildfires are increasing in the Mediterranean Basin due to more extreme fire seasons that often overwhelm the response capacity of fire suppression forces. In this study, we quantified the effect of climate change on fire danger (components of the Canadian FWI System) and wildfire behaviour characteristics (rate of spread and firelin...

The wildfire regime in Portugal has been responsible for millions of hectares of burnt area, and Alvares parish is no exception. In 2017, a severe wildfire burnt 60% of its area. Land abandonment has been increasing since the mid 20th century, and a large fraction of the forest area belongs to quasi-absent landowners. This has given rise to large,...

We present an analysis of the spatio-temporal trends derived from long-term burned area (BA) data series. Two global BA products were included in our analysis, the FireCCI51 (2001–2019) and the FireCCILT11 (1982–2018) datasets. The former was generated from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 250 m reflectance data, guided by 1 km...

Increasing efforts are being devoted to understanding fire patterns and changes highlighting the need for a consistent database about the location and extension of burned areas (BA). Satellite-derived BA mapping accuracy in the Brazilian savannas is limited by the underestimation of burn scars from small, fragmented fires and high cloudiness. Moreo...

Climate change has substantially increased the frequency of extreme droughts in the Amazon basin, generating concern about impacts on the world's largest tropical forest, which contributes about one‐seventh of the global vegetation carbon sink. Most research to understand drought impacts has focused on the immediate influences of such events, negle...

A freguesia de Alvares, no concelho de Góis, foi muito afetada pelos incêndios de junho de 2017, tendo ardido 70% da sua área. Para melhorar a proteção das comunidades locais e aumentar a sua capacidade de resposta, é fundamental avaliar o nível de exposição das povoações a grandes incêndios. Neste sentido, foi avaliado o nível de exposição das pov...

Aim Angolan Miombo woodlands, rich in timber species of the Leguminosae family, go through one of the highest rates of deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa. This study presents, on the basis of updated information of the distribution of Leguminosae timber species native to Angola, an integrated index framing the main threats for trees, which aims to...

The Brazilian savanna (Cerrado) is considered the most floristically diverse savanna in the world, home to more than seven thousand species. The region is a mosaic of savannas, grasslands and forests whose unique biophysical and landscape attributes are on the basis of a recent ecoregional map, paving the way to improved region-based strategies for...

The extreme 2017 fire season in Portugal led to widespread recognition of the need for a paradigm shift in forest and wildfire management. We focused our study on Alvares, a parish in central Portugal located in a fire-prone area, which had 60% of its area burned in 2017. We evaluated how different fuel treatment strategies may reduce wildfire haza...

The disastrous 2017 fire season in Portugal lead to widespread recognition of the need for a paradigm shift in forest and fire management. We focused our study on Alvares, a parish in central Portugal which had 60% of its area burned in 2017, with a large record of historical. We evaluated how different fuel treatment strategies can reduce wildfire...

O eucalipto tornou-se uma das espécies incontornáveis da floresta portuguesa. Nos últimos anos, a ocorrência de grandes incêndios tem vindo a aumentar (onde os ocorridos em junho e outubro de 2017 foram particularmente significativos), acentuando a polémica em torno do efeito das plantações de eucalipto na propagação do fogo. Do protagonismo socioe...

This chapter presents and analyzes comparatively for the first time data on the number, extent, severity and causes of wildfires affecting all countries in the RIOCC (Iberoamerican Network of Climate Change Offices, www.riocc.es) region, as well as on exposure and vulnerability of societies and ecosystems to these events, and the environmental and...

This paper describes an approach for harmonizing historical vector categorical maps with related modern maps. The approach aims at the correction of geometric distortions and semantic disagreements using alignment processes and analysis of thematic coherence. The harmonized version of the map produced by this approach can already be overlaid with o...

Fuel break (FB) networks are strategic locations for fire control and suppression. In order to be effective for wildfire control, they need to be maintained through regular interventions to reduce fuel loads. In this paper, we describe a monitoring system relying on Earth observations to detect fuel reduction inside the FB network being implemented...

Adequate algorithms and spatial resolution remote sensing imagery still hamper a comprehensive representation of fire regime in regions characterized by small and sparse burnt scars, such as the southern Cerrado. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor launched in 2011 upgrades the spatial resolution (375 m) and gives continuit...

Fire is a key driver of natural ecosystems in Africa. However, human activity and climate change have altered fire frequency and severity, with negative consequences for biodiversity conservation. Angola ranks among the countries with the highest fire activity in sub-Saharan Africa. In this study, we investigated the spatial and temporal trends of...

The large wildfires of June 2017 disturbed many communities in central Portugal. The civil parish of Alvares was severely affected, with about 60% of its area burnt. Assessing the risk of large wildfires affecting local communities is becoming increasingly important, to reduce potential losses in the future. In this study, we assessed wildfire risk...

Spanish/ English El Informe RIOCCADAPT, Adaptación frente a los riegos del cambio climático en los países iberoamericanos, financiado por el Programa ARAUCLIMA de la Cooperación Española, es una iniciativa pionera conformada por científicos de alto nivel, gestores y otros expertos para brindar información exhaustiva desde todas las áreas del conoc...

Fire is a natural disturbance in the Brazilian savannas, Cerrado, with substantial ecological and economic impacts. Most studies have characterized the fire regime in this biome using climate drivers but neglected the geographical variation of anthropogenic activities. These factors can trigger inappropriate fire-fighting decisions and biodiversity...

Ever since colonial times, the rural inhabitants of Guinea-Bissau have been blamed for lighting uncontrolled fires all over the country. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in two regions, a country-level rapid rural appraisal, and analysis of satellite active fire data, this essay shows how burning practices are, however, diversified according...

During the last decades, climate and land use changes led to an increased prevalence of megafires 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...

Understanding the role of vegetation fires in the Earth system is an important environmental problem. Although fire occurrence is influenced by natural factors, human activity related to land use and management has altered the temporal patterns of fire in several regions of the world. Hence, for a better insight into fires regimes it is of special...

Country wide monitoring of fuel breaks: the Portuguese Forest Service is not able to perform field monitoring of the status of fuel breaks - The FuelMon project

The Brazilian Cerrado vegetation has been increasingly threatened over the last decades and the significant loss of ~50% in its native cover is also related in part to the absence of a consistent fire policy in the region. Although the Cerrado is adapted to natural fires the significant changes in fire regimes might alter this biome irreparably. Wi...

Increasing availability of dense time series of moderate spatial resolution satellite data for mapping global burned areas calls for mapping algorithms designed to easily integrate data at different spatial and temporal resolutions, irrespective of particular grid constraints. In this paper, we describe a novel hybrid approach for global burned are...

Across the globe, human activities have been gaining importance relatively to climate and ecology as the main controls on fire regimes and consequently human activity became an important driver of the frequency, extent and intensity of vegetation burning worldwide. Our objective in the present study is to look for weekly cycles in vegetation fire a...

These ‘warming stripe’ graphics are visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in each country over the past 100+ years. Each stripe represents the temperature in that country averaged over a year. For most countries, the stripes start in the year 1901 and finish in 2018. For the UK, USA, Switzerland & Germany, the data starts...

Riparian ecosystems have a great potential for long-term carbon storage and sequestration. However, there is a growing demand on accurate estimations for the Mediterranean region and particularly using remote sensing approaches. In this study, we estimated the Above Ground Biomass (AGB) of a Mediterranean riparian forest using high-resolution multi...

One of the crucial input variables in fire danger rating systems is the water content of the soil, as well as of the living and dead fuels. This study concentrates on the Keetch-Byram Drought Index (KBDI) and the Drought Code (DC), which are both used to estimate the soil moisture deficit (SMD) and are inherent parts of well-established fire danger...

Knowledge about the current fire dynamics in the Brazilian Savannas (Cerrado) relies heavily on satellite-derived burned area (BA) products applied at the biome level. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of studies analyzing the consistency of currently available satellite products concerning BA location and extension for the region. Accordingly, w...

In Portugal and Spain, fire regimes have been significantly altered due to changes in anthropogenic and climatic factors. The development of a fire management strategy should take into account the past trends of fire incidence. We analyse the spatial and temporal trends of burned area in the Iberian Peninsula, merging four decades of forest fire da...

Biomass burning is an important environmental process with a strong influence on vegetation and on the atmospheric composition. It competes with microbes and herbivores to convert biomass to CO2 and it is a major contributor of gases and aerosols to the atmosphere. To better understand and predict global fire occurrence, fire models have been devel...

This paper presents a methodological approach for the assessment of the indicator 11.3.1: "Ratio of Land Consumption Rate to Population Growth Rate" proposed by the United Nations (UN), discussing the definitions and assumptions that support the indicator quantification, and analysing the results provided by different formulations applied to mainla...