Núria Aquilué

• PostDoc at CTFC (Spain) and CEF (Canada)
• PostDoc Position at Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia

This study presents results regarding the estimation of two critical variables for modelling fire behaviour and fire danger: the canopy base height (CBH) and the canopy bulk density (CBD). Both variables have been mapped as raster datasets at a 100-meter spatial resolution across Europe, harmonizing data for all EU countries. Therefore, these canop...

Canopy fuels and surface fuel models, topographic features and other canopy attributes such as stand height and canopy cover, provide the necessary spatial datasets required by various fire behaviour modelling simulators. This is a technical note reporting on a pan-European fuel map server, highlighting the methods for the production and validation...

Adopting a multi-criteria approach in forest management is essential for preserving or improving specific benefits while minimizing negative environmental impacts. Determining the appropriate long-term management approach for a forest requires considering heterogeneous environmental and social factors, as well as changes in forest characteristics o...

The combination of the 'Remains' and 'Biomod2' R packages facilitates access to a suite of modeling functions to explore prescribed fire planning, wildfire risk management and biodiversity conservation under land-use policy scenarios. This R-based modelling framework increase capacity building beyond academia and support policy-and decision-making...

Integrating fire into land management is crucial in fire-prone regions. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of prescribed fire (PF), we employed the REMAINS model in NW Iberia’s Transboundary Biosphere Reserve Gerês-Xurés. We tested three levels of prescribed fire treatment effort for shrubland and grassland, employing three spatial alloca...

Along with forest managers, builders are key change agents of forest ecosystems’ structure and composition through the specification and use of wood products. New forest management approaches are being advocated to increase the resilience and adaptability of forests to climate change and other natural disturbances. Such approaches call for a divers...

Modelling landscape dynamics is crucial for assessing the potential effectiveness of upgraded land management. In fire-prone regions, wildfires play a critical role in shaping landscapes, and land-use and fire suppression policies strongly influence landscape patterns and fire regimes. In this paper, we introduce REMAINS, a spatially explicit proce...

The FirESmart project – Nature-based solutions for preventive fire management and sustained supply of ecosystem services. Final Report – Project Deliverable R03

In southern Europe, land abandonment and an unbalanced investment toward fire suppression instead of prevention has gradually increased wildfire risk, which calls for a paradigm change in fire management policies. Here we combined scenario analysis, fire landscape modelling, and economic tools to identify which land-use policies would reduce the ex...

The increasing effects of climate and global change oblige ecosystem-based management to adapt forestry practices to deal with uncertainties. Here we provide an overview to identify the challenges facing the boreal forest under projected future change, including altered natural disturbance regimes, biodiversity loss, increased forest fragmentation,...

Global climate warming is expected to increase wildfire hazard in many regions of the world. In southern Europe, land abandonment and an unbalanced investment toward fire suppression instead of prevention has gradually increased wildfire risk, which calls for a paradigm change in fire management policies. Here we combined scenario analysis, fire la...

This project deliverable summaries the main findings and policy recommendations of the FirESmart project – Nature-based solutions for preventive fire management and sustained supply of ecosystem services. This research was funded by national funds through the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., under the FirESmart project (PCIF/MOG/0...

Increased large and high-intensity wildfires causes large socioeconomic and ecological impacts, which demands improved landscape management approaches where both ecological and societal dimensions are integrated. Engaging society in fire management requires a better understanding of stakeholders' perceptions of wildfires and landscape management. H...

Wildfires are increasing in importance in many regions of the Canadian boreal forest and are an ongoing risk for forest management activities. We simulated the effects of fires on long-term harvest levels on the 59 forest management units of the province of Québec, Canada, for the 2020–2100 period. Different climate change pathways (stable, RCP 4.5...

- Bayesian GLMs for non-wood ecosystem services (ES) - Formulation and projection of scenarios of Climate Change Mitigation Solutions (CCMS) and climate change at EU and national scales - GLMs for evaluation of effects of climate and CCMS scenarios on ES

To reach the Paris Agreement, societies need to increase the global terrestrial carbon sink. There are many climate change mitigation solutions (CCMS) for forests, including increasing bioenergy, bioeconomy and protection. Bioenergy and bioeconomy solutions use climate-smart, intensive management to generate high quantities of bioenergy and bioprod...

Natural disturbances exacerbated by novel climate regimes are increasing worldwide, threatening the ability of forest ecosystems to mitigate global warming through carbon sequestration and to provide other key ecosystem services. One way to cope with unknown disturbance events is to promote the ecological resilience of the forest by increasing both...

Projecting forest dynamics as a function of alternative management strategies and climatic conditions is key to develop sound forest policy and management planning. In Spain there is a need for a full set of climate-sensitive individual-tree growth and yield models suitable for country-level simulations. In this paper we present environmentally dri...

Forest ecosystems face an increasing pressure of insect pest outbreaks due to changes in land-use, new climatic conditions, and the arrival of new invasive alien species. Also, insect outbreaks may interact with other shifting disturbances such as fire and drought, that eventually may boost the impacts of pests on forest ecosystems. In the case of...

text: Wildfires are one of the most common disturbances of terrestrial ecosystems at the global scale, but the increased frequency of extreme events is causing more social and ecological loses. The problem of wildfires in complex socioecological systems-where both social and ecological factors interact-requires the inclusion of the diversity of loc...

Context Forest landscapes worldwide are shaped by abiotic drivers such as fire, windstorms, and drought, but also by biotic drivers like insect pests and pathogens. Although the effects of such drivers on forest dynamics have been studied extensively, knowledge of the interactions between insect pests and other drivers of change is still coarse and...

Biodiversity faces many threats and these can interact to produce outcomes that may not be predicted by considering their effects in isolation. Habitat loss and fragmentation (hereafter 'fragmentation') and altered fire regimes are important threats to biodiversity, but their interactions have not been systematically evaluated across the globe. In...

Given the uncertainty of global environmental changes, forest managers need reliable and science-based tools to support planning decisions. To evaluate the state of forests as well as the outcomes of new management practices aimed at fostering the adaptive capacity of forest ecosystems, methods and metrics for practitioners should be self-explanato...

Fire's growing impacts on ecosystems Fire has played a prominent role in the evolution of biodiversity and is a natural factor shaping many ecological communities. However, the incidence of fire has been exacerbated by human activity, and this is now affecting ecosystems and habitats that have never been fire prone or fire adapted. Kelly et al. rev...

Appendix A. Species information: taxonomic group, scientific name, acronym, number of presences (N), regional conservation status (according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature - IUCN), Iberian endemicity, and main habitat preference. Model replicates refers to the number of simulations carried out for each modelling algorithm. Qu...

Rewilding has been proposed as an opportunity for biodiversity conservation in abandoned landscapes. However, rewilding is challenged by the increasing fire risk associated with more flammable landscapes, and the loss of open-habitat specialist species. Contrastingly, supporting High Nature Value farmlands (HNVf) has been also highlighted as an opt...

Forests are projected to undergo dramatic compositional and structural shifts prompted by global changes, such as climatic changes and intensifying natural disturbance regimes. Future uncertainty makes planning for forest management exceptionally difficult, demanding novel approaches to maintain or improve the ability of forest ecosystems to respon...

The environmental and socio-economic impacts of wildfires are foreseen to increase across southern Europe over the next decades regardless of increasing resources allocated for fire suppression. This study aims to identify fire-smart management strategies that promote wildfire hazard reduction, climate regulation ecosystem service and biodiversity...

Climate change projections over the Mediterranean basin point towards an increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events that will directly impact ecosystems resilience. In this study we evaluated future trends of soil loss in forestland in Catalonia (NE Spain) due to fires and vegetation dynamics, considering the potential future impacts of...

El MEDFIRE Val d’Aran és un model dissenyat per a reproduir el règim d’incendis (patrons espacio-temporals de foc) a la Val d’Aran (VA) basat en la relació dels incendis amb el clima i el paisatge (ignicions, vegetació, edat de la vegetació i gestió [cremes prescrites i extinció]). L’objectiu del model és poder analitzar les interaccions espacials...

Ecosystem functions provided by forests are threatened by direct and indirect effects of global change drivers such as climate warming land‐use change, biological invasions, and shifting natural disturbance regimes. To develop resilience‐based forest management, new tools and methods are needed to quantitatively estimate forest resilience to manage...

In densely populated fire-prone regions, interactions between global change drivers, such as land-cover changes and climate change, may increase the frequency and severity of wildfires impacting forest ecosystems, thus diminishing their capability of provisioning key ecosystem goods and services for these societies. Yet, landscape mosaics play a cr...

Abstract Human impacts on Earth’s ecosystems have greatly intensified in the last decades. This is reflected in unexpected disturbance events, as well as new and increasing socio-economic demands, all of which are affecting the resilience of forest ecosystems worldwide and the provision of important ecosystem services. This Anthropocene era is forc...

Os efeitos combinados do abandono dos usos tradicionais do solo e da mudança climática das últimas décadas têm levado a regimes de incêndios que ultrapassam a capacidade de extinção, com subsequente aumento no risco para a saúde, bem-estar social e económico, bem como para a salvaguarda dos recursos materiais, assim como um forte impacto nos ecossi...

The impact of wildfires is expected to increase across Southern Europe over the next decades, regardless of increasing fire-fighting efficiency and large resources allocated for fire suppression. Fire management policies will be challenged by severe fire regimes that could push current suppression capacity beyond a tipping point, resulting in a sub...

This study aims to identify management policies, leading to more resilient or less flammable landscapes (i.e. fire-smart landscapes), for a more effective wildfire mitigation and bird conservation in the near future. We combined fire-landscape model simulations with species distribution models to evaluate the potential effects of alternative fire a...

Landscape models are comprehensive tools that allow for an understanding of landscape dynamics and a means of deriving future projections in the context of global change. Vegetation and ecological processes such as growth, death or regeneration are essential components of forest landscape dynamics, but their inclusion in landscape-level modelling f...

Fire regimes are shifting or are expected to do so under global change. Current fire suppression is not able to control all wildfires, and its capability to do so might be compromised under harsher climate conditions. Alternative fire management strategies may allow to counteract predicted fire trends, but we lack quantitative tools to evaluate the...

Highly managed forest landscapes are complex socio-ecological systems exposed to multiple drivers of change. Their dynamics emerge from the multi-scale interplays between ecological processes, natural disturbance regimes, anthropic activities, and exogenous factors such as climate. Global changes are expected to interfere on these processes leading...

A new approach to immunizing our forests against uncertainty (essay) In the present context of global change, managing our forests is a major challenge, in particular because of the great uncertainty associated with this change. Faced with this new reality, our methods of monitoring and forecasting the developments in our forests are no longer effe...

Los modelos de dinámicas del paisaje son herramientas especialmente adecuadas para 14 proyectar cambios en el paisaje forestal en un contexto de cambio global. En este trabajo se 15 propone el estudio empírico a gran escala de la dinámica de la vegetación integrada en un 16 modelo de dinámicas del paisaje. Se ha modelado el crecimiento en área basi...

La identificación de los posibles impactos futuros del cambio climático en los bosques y los servicios ecosistémicos asociados es útil para su planificación espacio-temporal. En este estudio hemos estimado y proyectado a corto-medio plazo la idoneidad climática y el crecimiento potencial (hipotética calidad de estación alta) de las principales espe...

Increases in fire impacts over many regions of the world have led to large-scale investments in fire-suppression efforts. There is increasing recognition that biomass extraction for energy purposes may become an important forest-management practice in fire-prone ecosystems. However, at present, very few studies have explicitly assessed biomass extr...

Afforestation after land abandonment and the occurrence of large fires have significantly altered the composition of pine-oak ecosystems in the Mediterranean since 1950s, the latter favouring the prevalence of oak forests and shrublands to that of pine forests. Nevertheless, our ability to integrate the processes driving these changes in modelling...

The temperate forests of Mexico are important economically for many small communities as they provide numerous essential ecosystem services. They also contain the highest biodiversity of oak and pine species in the world. Yet they have not been discussed and investigated as much as other temperate forests. This paper presents these unique temperate...

Despite the huge resources invested in fire suppression, the impact of wildfires has considerably increased across the Mediterranean region since the second half of the 20th century. Modulating fire suppression efforts in mild weather conditions is an appealing but hotly-debated strategy to use unplanned fires and associated fuel reduction to creat...

We investigate first whether fire regimes resulting from the combination of climate change and fire-fighting policy may affect species distributions in Mediterranean landscapes, and second to what extent distributional dynamics may be constrained by the spatial legacy of historical land use. Catalonia (north-eastern Spain). We modelled the distribu...

Available data show that future changes in global change drivers may lead to an increasing impact of fires on terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Yet, fire regime changes in highly humanised fire-prone regions are difficult to predict because fire effects may be heavily mediated by human activities We investigated the role of fire suppression strateg...

Initialization of model variables. This appendix describes the main data sources employed to initialize spatial state variables and parameters used in the MEDFIRE model and described in Appendix S1. (DOC)

Statistical distributions for the total area burnt (A) and the percentage of area burnt by large fires (B) obtained after 100 simulations of the MEDFIRE model for the 1989–1999 period. Results are presented for the whole study area (ALL) and for the three bioclimatic sub-regions: North-East (NE), North-West (NW:) and South-Central (SC). Black squar...

Three-way ANOVA tables summarizing the results of twenty-year simulated fire regimes scenarios in terms of the total area burnt (A) and percentage of area burnt by large fires. (DOC)

Sub-model Description. This appendix describes details of the two sub-models of the MEDFIRE model, the fire sub-model Forest growth and the vegetation dynamics sub-model. (DOC)

Los bosques endémicos de Pino laricio (Pinus nigra spp salzmannii) son uno de los hábitats protegidos por la Red Natura 2000 y representan un sistema de especial interés en el Mediterráneo ya que los grandes incendios forestales pueden ver comprometida buena parte de su distribución futura debido a su escasa regeneración posterior. En este trabajo...