Paulo Fernandes

Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro | utad · Centro de Investigação e de Tecnologias Agroambientais e Biológicas (CITAB)

Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Ait.) stands are prone to high-intensity fire. Fuel treatments lessen potential fire behaviour and severity, but evidence of their effectiveness when tested by wildfire is extremely scarce in Europe. We assess the longevity of prescribed burning in maritime pine plantations in decreasing fire severity. Heights of crown...

Eucalypts, especially blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus), have been extensively planted in Portugal and nowadays dominate most of its forest landscapes. Large-scale forestation programs can intensify fire activity, and blue gum plantations are often viewed as highly flammable due to the nature and structure of the fuel complex. The role of eucalypt pla...

Forest fire management relies on fire danger rating to optimize its suite of activities. Limiting fire size is the fire management target whenever minimizing burned area is the primary goal, such as in the Mediterranean Basin. Within the region, wildfire incidence is especially acute in Portugal, a country where fire-influencing anthropogenic and l...

Adoption of prescribed burning is increasing as the treatment chosen to decrease fuel hazard in southern Europe but little is known about how it affects wildfire activity. We assessed the effectiveness of prescribed burning treatments by analysing the survival of treatment units to wildfire in mainland Portugal (2005-2017). We examined the time-dep...

This study explored, for the first time, the drivers shaping large fire size and high severity of forest fires classified as level-2 in Spain, which pose a great danger to the wildland–urban interface. Specifically, we examined how bottom-up (fuel type and topography) and top-down (fire weather) controls shaped level-2 fire behavior through a Rando...

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...

Background As fire regimes are changing and wildfire disasters are becoming more frequent, the term megafire is increasingly used to describe impactful wildfires, under multiple meanings, both in academia and popular media. This has resulted in a highly ambiguous concept. Approach We analysed the use of the term ‘megafire’ in popular media to dete...

Fire has been a widely used tool in habitat and landscape management, mainly associated with land use dynamics of deforestation, pasture renewal, hunting and reclaiming new agriculture and rangeland areas. Ancient societies followed norms and rules regarding the used of fire. However, as these societies developed and land ownership changed, the con...

Traditional, rural, native, or indigenous fire has coexisted with lightning-caused fire since the origin of Humanity. In Portugal, several uses of fire played an essential role in supporting communities from the settlement of the Portuguese territory within complex agrosilvo-pastoral systems. Previous studies approached traditional fire knowledge f...

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...

Context: Long-term farmland abandonment is increasing fuel hazard in many mountainous landscapes of the Mediterranean Basin. Combined with ongoing climate change, fire activity and fire regimes may change in the future, thus challenging the management of these regions. Objectives: To assess the effects of fire-smart management strategies on landsca...

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...

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...

Socio-demographic changes in recent decades and fire policies centered on fire suppression have substantially diminished the ability to maintain low fuel loads at the landscape scale in marginal lands. Currently, shepherds face many barriers to the use of fire for restoring pastures in shrub-encroached communities. The restrictions imposed are base...

Human activities are among the major causes of native forests decline. Establishing concrete conservation priorities and restoration goals for these communities is challenging as information is scattered, detailed maps are usually missing, and their high ecological value is hard to synthesize. Using life-forms and simple rules about cover values, w...

Alto Minho (in northwestern Iberia) is one of the European regions most affected by fires. Many of these fires originate from rangeland management of Atlantic heathlands, and, while being illegal, often are not actively suppressed. In this study, pastoral fires (autumn-to-spring fires unrecorded by authorities), spring wildfires, and summer wildfir...

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...

Alto Minho is a region of northern Portugal in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, which is one of the regions in Europe where fires are more frequent. The historical mapping of burned areas has been fundamental to characterize the fire regime and to determine wildfire prevention policies and urban planning measures. Over the last decades, seve...

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

Characterizing the fire regime in regions prone to extreme wildfire behavior is essential for providing comprehensive insights on potential ecosystem response to fire disturbance in the context of global change. We aimed to disentangle the linkage between contemporary damage-related attributes of wildfires as shaped by the environmental controls of...

Background: Mediterranean Europe is witnessing an increase in extreme wildfire events, which has led to increasing socioeconomic and ecological impacts. Postfire restoration emerges as an important tool for impact mitigation and ecosystem recovery. However, there is a large knowledge gap on the ecological effects of such interventions. We used remo...

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...

The wall-to-wall prediction of fuel structural characteristics conducive to high fire severity is essential to provide integrated insights for implementing pre-fire management strategies designed to mitigate the most harmful ecological effects of fire in fire-prone plant communities. Here, we evaluate the potential of high point cloud density LiDAR...

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 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...

Climate change will increase the frequency of drought, heat waves, and wildfires. We intended to analyse how fire recurrence and/or induced water stress can affect seed germination and root cell division in Pinus pinaster Aiton. Seeds from stands with no prior fire history and from post-fire regeneration (in areas burnt once, twice, and thrice) in...

Integrated management of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) in heterogeneous landscapes requires considering the potential trade-offs between conflicting objectives. The UNESCO's Biosphere Reserve zoning scheme is a suitable context to address these trade-offs by considering multiple management zones that aim to minimise conflicts between man...

Wildfire is a common phenomenon in Mediterranean countries but the 2022 fire season has been extreme in southwest Europe (Portugal, Spain and France). Here we provide a preliminary but comprehensive analysis of 2022's wildfire season in southwest Europe. Burned area has exceeded the 2001–2021 median by a factor of 52 in some regions and large wildf...

Exotic annual grasses invasion across northern Great Basin rangelands has promoted a grass-fire cycle that threatens the sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) steppe ecosystem. In this sense, high accumulation rates and persistence of litter from annual species largely increase the amount and continuity of fine fuels. Here, we highlight the potential use and...

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 InduForestFire project seeks mitigation solutions to avoid damage caused by large fires in industrial areas through scientific studies that explore the phenomena associated with these damages. For this, the project involves two approaches of very different nature, but complementary. The first is a forest-based approach, aimed at understanding f...

A floresta é um dos ecossistemas naturais mais complexos, sendo a sua evolução ao longo do tempo determinada por múltiplos fatores, entre os quais a própria dinâmica de desenvolvimento das árvores. As alterações climáticas podem inviabilizar uma das fases mais importantes da vida das florestas: a sua renovação por métodos naturais. O prolongamento...

The mild climate and, in recent decades, the increased demand for timber have favoured the establishment of extensive plantations of fast-growing species such as Pinus radiata in Galicia (a fire-prone region in northwestern Spain). This species is characterised by very poor self-pruning; unmanaged pine stands have a worrying vertical continuity of...

Book of abstracts of the 9th Portuguese Forest Congress, held in Funchal from October 10 to 15, 2022: https://9cfn.pt/

Wildfire is a common phenomenon in Mediterranean countries but the 2022 fire season has been extreme in southwest Europe (Portugal, Spain and France). Burned area has exceeded the 2001-2021 median by a factor of 52 in some regions and large wildfires started to occur in June- July, earlier than the traditional fire season. These anomalies were asso...

Extensive forest planting in Southern Europe during the twentieth century reconciled economic objectives with ecological restoration. But the resulting forests are also fuelling the intensity and magnitude of recent wildfires. As well as urgently addressing the hazard of accumulated fuel across the landscape, people should be designing future plant...

Fires of natural origin are usually a very small fraction of the total number of fires in southern Europe, and as such, they are not relevant to contemporary fire regimes and policies, even if they occasionally develop into large-scale conflagrations. However, lighting-caused fires might have been a relevant landscape-level disturbance prior to the...

In the last decades, fire regimes in Europe have changed towards an increased occurrence of extreme fire events with large burned areas and associated impacts. Portugal is one of the countries most affected by wildfires, with extraordinary negative impacts. Postfire emergency stabilization is an important restoration practice to mitigate fire impac...

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...

Fire simulation models are useful to advance fire research and improve landscape management. However, a better understanding of these tools is crucial to increase their reliability and expansion into research fields where their application remains limited (e.g., ecosystem services). We evaluated several components of the BFOLDS Fire Regime Module a...

We present a collection of tools to support the analysis of vegetation data in the R environment. This collection contains several open-source R packages with several different functionalities: i) diffval, with functions aiming at obtaining classifications based on differential taxa, using discrete/combinatoric approaches and mathematical optimizat...

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...

Ascoli D, Moris JV, Sil A, Fernandes P. 2022. Using the Rothermel package in R to test standard and custom fuel models against global fire behavior data. 3rd International Conference on Fire Behavior and Risk, 3-6 May, Alghero (Italy).

The implementation of climate-smart policies to enhance carbon sequestration and reduce emissions is being encouraged worldwide to fight climate change. Afforestation practices and rewilding initiatives are climate-smart examples suggested to tackle these issues. In contrast, fire-smart approaches, by stimulating traditional farmland activities or...

The suggestion has been made within the wildland fire community that the rate of spread in the upper portion of the fire danger spectrum is largely independent of the physical fuel characteristics in certain forest ecosystem types. Our review and analysis of the relevant scientific literature on the subject suggests that fuel characteristics have a...

Background The characterization of surface and canopy fuel loadings in fire-prone pine ecosystems is critical for understanding fire behavior and anticipating the most harmful ecological effects of fire. Nevertheless, the joint consideration of both overstory and understory strata in burn severity assessments is often dismissed. The aim of this wor...

The degree to which burn severity influences the recovery of aboveground carbon density (ACD) of live pools in shrublands remains unclear. Multitemporal LiDAR data was used to evaluate ACD recovery three years after fire in shrubland ecosystems as a function of burn severity immediately after fire across an environmental and productivity gradient i...