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Tools to support design of fire-resistant landscapes in Portuguese ecosystems

Publication . Botequim, Brigite Roxo; Borges, José Guilherme Calvão; Fernandes, Paulo Alexandre Martins

Forests are a key element in the Portuguese landscape. Moreover, fire hazard is a central challenge at national context. How can appropriate management potentially change fire behaviour, fire damage and the difficulty of fire suppression? What are the causal relationships between fire proneness, stand structure and forest stand composition? The common objective of the doctoral research among the five studies is to address the above issues based on principles of creating fire-resistant forests, underlying factors and implications for active forest management, while sustaining effective fire prevention levels. The ultimate goal is to provide forest managers and policy makers with tools to support their decisions, and more effectively align management policies, plans, and practices across fire-prone landscapes. The first research phase aims, across a range of scales from the individual tree to the stand level, respectively: (i) modelling the annual probability of wildfire occurrence of pure and even-aged eucalypt stands; (ii) developing a shrub biomass accumulation model, and (iii) a post-fire mortality model at stand level and the individual tree survival probability to mitigate damage in any forest stand structure. The second phase introduces fire behavior modeling coupled with common stand variables as a tool to (iv) assess potential crown fire occurrence through stand structure/stand composition, and (v) draw guidelines that express the difficulty of fire suppression in those fire-prone forest stands. The accuracy of the research findings can provide an interesting insight to support hazard-reduction silvicultural practices in Portuguese ecosystems

2015Doctoral thesis

Open access

Improving management decisions in portuguese forests through fire behaviour modeling: guidelines to support a sustainable landscape

Publication . Botequim, B.; Fernandes, P.M.; Borges, J.G.

Understanding wildfire behavior at the landscape-level is critical to address wildfire impacts in Portuguese forest management planning. Thus, fire spread was simulated in three forested landscape to assist forest managers in identifying high-risk areas for actively integrating stand-level fuel treatments with explicit landscape-level management planning and develop fire prevention priorities. Specifically, several modeling applications to detect significant fire-landscape interactions between stand-level features and fire behavior were fitted to classify Portuguese forests to fire risk levels and create guidelines to support hazard-reduction silvicultural practice

2011Other

Open access

Análise do comportamento do fogo na Mata Nacional de Leiria

Publication . Mérida, António Carlos Calvo; Garcia-Gonzalo, Jordi; Botequim, Brigite Roxo

Actualmente, os incêndios florestais são considerados um dos factores com maior peso na degradação da qualidade do meio ambiente dos nossos ecossistemas. Portugal é um dos países que apresenta maiores problemas em relação aos incêndios florestais na Europa. Este trabalho pretende ser um recurso válido na investigação do desenvolvimento de novos métodos na prevenção dos incêndios florestais. O Pinheiro bravo (Pinus pinaster) ocupa uma extensa área no país. Com propósito de estudar, analisar e compreender a dinâmica dos fogos florestais nos povoamentos desta espécie, foi necessário seleccionar uma área representativa, a “Mata Nacional de Leiria. O trabalho divide-se em várias partes: pesquisa de programas informáticos capazes de simular e caracterizar o comportamento do fogo, selecção do programa FlamMap para realizar as simulações, obtenção dos parâmetros de entrada no mesmo (INPUTS), execução das simulações e cálculo dos mapas do comportamento do fogo (OUTPUTS) com base em quatro cenários de distribuição das classes de idade a nível de povoamento, selecção do cenário mais adequado e finalmente elaboração de duas tabelas de dados que incluem toda a informação relativa as simulações realizadas

2010Master thesis

Open access