7th Workshop on Forest Fire Management - EARSeL, European ...

MULTISCALE CHARACTERIZATION OF SPATIAL PATTERN OVER 1998-2006
WILDLAND FIRE EVENTS IN THE BASILICATA REGION
Abstract: In this paper, we analyzed the spatial and temporal patterns of
fire occurrence in the Basilicata Region during 1998-2006. Spatial indicators
of autocorrelations, such as Moran’s Index (I) and the Getis & Ord’s
Index (G) were used to characterize the inter-annual temporal/spatial fire
distribution and to understand if it is random (autocorrelation equal to
zero), uniform (negative autocorrelation) or clustered (positive autocorrelation).
1 - Introduction
M. Danese 1 , B. Murgante 1
University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy
A. Lanorte 2 , R. Lasaponara 2
CNR-IMAA, Tito Scalo (PZ), Italy
a.lanorte@imaa.cnr.it
The spatial and temporal pattern of wildfires is a key point in the study of
the dynamics of fire disturbance. It has important implications for vegetation
patterns and resource management strategies. Nowadays, the growing
availability of forest fire data archive with detailed information on individual
fires (where, when, how fire occurs) can allow us to characterize and
understand (i) how the fire events are distributed across different areas, (ii)
how the fire events are clustered across space. Thus a number of papers
have been focused on the characterization of the temporal pattern and
temporal correlation focusing on the “intra-annual” clusterization of wildfires
(see for example Tuia et al., 2008). Considerable uncertainty remains
regarding the characterization of inter-annual variability of fire incidence
as well as relation between fire activity variability and climate dynamics.
In this paper, we focus on the inter-annual clusterization of wildfires in the
Basilicata Region considering the fire events occurred during the 1998-
2006 time window. Moran’s Index (I) and the Getis & Ord’s Index (G) were
used for our analysis.
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