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

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I - PRE-FIRE PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT
extensive environmental damage in forest and agriculture areas. Historical
fire trends in these countries show an increase in the total number of fires
from the 1986-1995 to 1996-2006 period. Regarding fire causes, in the
three countries more than 90% of the fires are due to causes related to
human activities. Concerning land cover changes, the three countries show
a similar trend characterized by increase of urbanized area and decrease of
agricultural lands. This trend is sharper in France and Portugal and less evident
in Spain (after analysis of Corine land cover changes -CLC1990 -
CLC2000- dataset, http://dataservice.eea.europa.eu/, May 2009).
2.2 - Data
The fire data source used in this work is the fire database of the European
Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS, http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/, May
2009) which integrates harmonized fire statistics from the EU countries.
This database is stored at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability
of the Joint Research Centre (JRC). It contains information on individual
fire events related to the location of the ignition point (NUTS3), the fire
date, presumed cause and burned area. The fire causes are classified in the
following four broad categories: unknown, lightning, accident or negligence
and deliberate. The fire data used in the study cover 22 years, split in two
periods: 1985-1995 and 1996-2006. We have used Corine Land Cover 1990
(CLC1990) and 2000 (CLC2000) to analyze the landscape changes in the
study areas. The Corine land cover changes (CLC1990 - CLC2000) dataset
(http://dataservice.eea.europa.eu/dataservice/, May 2009) combines
CLC1990 and CLC2000. From this map, which includes all the category
changes from CLC level 3, we have aggregated the main land covers and the
changes between them: urban, agricultural, forest, grasslands and shrublands.
We have carried out the analysis at NUTS level 3 (province). The vector
layer with the NUTS3 boundaries has been taken from the
Eurostat/GISCO (Geographic Information System of the European
Commission) database (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/gisco/introduction,
May 2009).
2.3 - Statistical analysis
For the fire data, we have analyzed the relative increase and decrease of
negligence and deliberate caused fires by NUTS3 as percentage of the total
number of fires with known cause. For the land cover data we have calculated
the extent of each land cover change category and referred to the
total extent of the NUTS3. To examine the significance of the association
between the increase or decrease of human-caused wildfires and land cover
changes we have applied the Fisher exact test of significance. This test can
be used instead of the chi-square test in 2 by 2 tables particularly for small