Vassiliki Varela

National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos | ncsr · Environmental Research Laboratory (EREL)

The island of Kythira, in Greece, suffered a devastating forest fire that started on August 4, 2017. After that, it became evident that the location of the island, away from aerial fire suppression resources bases and with limited capacity for quick arrival of significant ground firefighting reinforcements, necessitates careful fire prevention and...

Wildfires can either mediate or endanger forest ecosystem services and ecological processes. If left uncontrolled, wildfires can cause severe damage and negative cascading effects. For example, atmospheric pollution, health issues, soil erosion, landslides, biotic damages, and ecosystem degradation. The undergoing climate changes across Europe and...

The island of Kythira in Greece suffered a major forest fire in 2017 that burned 8.91% of its total area and revealed many challenges regarding fire management. Following that, the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Nature joined forces with the Institute of Mediterranean and Forest Ecosystems in a project aiming to improve fire prevention ther...

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...

Safety in touristic destinations is of utmost importance since tourists’ preferences change frequently in response to emerging threats. Natural hazards are a significant risk and, as such, they need to be considered in the effort for safe tourism. Services and systems monitoring and predicting extreme natural phenomena and disasters in sites of spe...

The present work introduces a case study on the climate resilience of interconnected critical infrastructures to forest fires, that was performed within the framework on H2020 EU-CIRCLE project (GA 653824). It was conducted in South France, one of the most touristic European regions, and also one of the regions at the highest forest fire risk that...

This work introduces a methodology for assessing near-future fire weather pattern changes based on the Canadian Fire Weather Index system components (Fire Weather Index (FWI), Initial Spread Index (ISI), Fire Severity Rating (FSR)), applied in tourist areas in Greece. Four series of daily raster-based datasets for the fire seasons (May-October), co...

Wildfires are critical natural hazards, both in the Mediterranean and boreal regions of Europe, causing significant environmental and economic damages and losses. Operational drought and fire risk forecast services on sub-seasonal, seasonal and climatic scale allow fire protection authorities to increase preparedness and response in drought and fir...

In this letter, we propose an approach based on the use of Sentinel-2 spectral indices and self-organizing map (SOM) to automatically map burned areas and burned severity. These analyses were performed on a test area in Chania, located in Crete, affected by a fire (around 200 ha) that occurred from July 13, 2018 to July 28, 2018. The investigated a...

Projection of forest fire danger due to climate change in Greece

Fire occurrence and behaviour in Mediterranean-type ecosystems strongly depend on the air temperature and wind conditions, the amount of fuel load and the drought conditions that drastically increase flammability, particularly during the summer period. In order to study the fire danger due to climate change for these ecosystems, the meteorologicall...

The Fire Weather Index (FWI) has been studied by several researchers for a number ofgeographical areas in the world and has been proven to be an effective index for fire dangerassessment. However, limited work has been done so far, for the calculation, the appropriateclassification and mapping of FWI, at a higher spatial resolution that could be mo...

This paper introduces a methodological approach for identifying the resilience of interconnected EU critical infrastructures to climate change. The proposed approach tries to establish a consequence-based modelling framework for assessing climate-dependent causal relationships between CI operation and response to climate impacts with an aim to mini...

Tsunami preparedness is fundamentally enhanced having available a comprehensive catalogue of procedures to be applied one by one thus ensuring a fully working evacuation plan over time. All these procedures are grouped into three basic steps to be performed subsequently: a first step in order to generate a fully valid first instance of an evacuatio...

This handbook is dedicated to provide thorough and hands‐on information and a fully‐comprehensive methodology of tsunami evacuation plan generation. Hence community‐employed decision makers or similar stakeholders are supplied with a detailed guideline to implement a fully‐fledged evacuation plan within three stages: set‐up of valid first instance...

Forest fires burn at the local scale, but their massive occurrence causes effects which have global dimensions. Furthermore climate change projections associate global warming to a significant increase in forest fire activity. Warmer and drier conditions are expected to increase the frequency, duration and intensity of fires, and greater amounts of...

Given the heterogeneity of the Mediterranean landscapes and fhe restrlction in personnel and resources, the identification ofpatches requiring the application ofspecific rehabilitation measures due to lowpost-fire resilience becomes important. The methodologyproposed in this paperis acting towards this direction. The research has been carried out i...

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Wildland-urban interface (WUI) in the European environment and more specifically in the Mediterranean area is a very complex spatial context with many interrelated social, natural resource and wildfire issues. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be a useful tool for WUI management, through their capability of handling in an integrated environm...

Fire hazards and risk are of great interest in terms of prevention and control. This study focuses on the construction of a GIS-based tool for fire growth patterns and fire propagation characteristics for modeling such hazards in the national park of Valia Kalda in Pindus Mountain, Greece. At a first stage, data concerning previous fires in the reg...

Abstract Given the heterogeneity,of the Mediterranean,landscapes,and,the restriction in personnel,and resources, the identification of patches requiring the application of specific rehabilitation measures due to low post-fire resilience becomes,important. The methodology,proposed,in this paper is acting towards,this direction. The research has been...