Wildfires are a natural hazard which is growing in intensity and spreading in range across all planet’s ecosystems with impacts on the environment, human population, and infrastructures. To strengthen prevention activities, land use planning and resource allocation, a thorough understanding of territorial features determining hazardous wildfires is crucial in fire management and Civil Protection activities. The proposed approach learns from wildfire synoptic data in order to obtain susceptibility, intensity and hazard static maps. A Machine Learning approach is adopted to construct susceptibility maps, crossing the wildfire database with the predisposing factors (geographical, climatic and anthropic features). Potential intensity of wildfire, in turn, is built using the vegetation type as a proxy. Hazard is built via an expert-based contingency matrix crossing susceptibility and potential wildfire intensity classes for each analyzed pixel. This mapping approach leads to the detection of the areas which are more likely to experience hazardous and impactful wildfires. The case study is applied to sixteen countries of the Mediterranean Basin, producing output maps at 500m resolution, relying on open data as input layers. The susceptibility assessment allows for Explainable AI procedures, identifying the main drivers of wildfire occurrence at continental level. The results will be compared to the ones obtained in the previous studies at national level.

Uncontrolled late season fires in the Brazilian Cerrado promote deforestation, produce greenhouse gases and are a major threat to the conservation of biodiversity in protected areas. Since 2014, governmental institutions implemented early dry season (EDS) prescribed burnings as part of Integrated Fire Management (IFM) in protected areas of the Cerrado, with the aim to reduce the area burned and severity of mid/late dry season (MDS/LDS) fires. The concept of reducing high intensity M/LDS fires through EDS prescribed burning poses a GHG mitigation potential that was already successfully demonstrated in other savannah ecosystems. The IFM activities in the Brazilian Cerrado offer a good case study on emission abatement potentials in regard to the net-zero pathways both at Governmental and corporate level. We here assessed the effectiveness of existing IFM activities in promoting emission abatement. Over a six-year period, protected areas with PM showed significant trends of increased EDS active fires of +207% with increased EDS burned areas from 6.3% to 30.0% of the total yearly burned areas. In the same period, MDS and LDS active fires were significantly reduced by -39% and -17%, respectively, with a reduction of M/LDS burned areas from 91.6% to 66.5% of the total yearly burned areas. By applying this observed shift in fire seasonality from observed IFM activities to all protected areas and to the whole Cerrado for the same period, an emission abatement potential of 924,719 and 2,713,279 tCO2e/y is estimated, respectively.

Like many other countries, Portugal faces an escalating wildland fire problem that has motivated policymakers to expand existing fuel management plans to reduce national wildfire risk. The Portuguese plan sets highly ambitious goals, including to decrease the annual burned area and proportion of large fires (> 500 ha) by approximately one half. One of the cornerstones of the plan is the implementation of a linear fuel break network combined with strategic landscape treatments that are expected to significantly slow the spread of wildfires and enhance suppression effectiveness. However, national-scale decision support tools to prioritize and schedule treatments and allocate budgets among districts and municipalities are lacking. In this talk we will describe our efforts to couple wildfire simulation and scenario planning models to analyse alternative investment allocation strategies and build implementation scenarios. The overall approach mirrors the process used by the authors to identify priority landscapes as part of the 2020 US Forest Service Wildfire Crisis Strategy. In prior work in Portugal, we used the MTT fire simulation model and Corrine fuels data to generate national scale spatial data on burn probability, fire intensity, and fire transmission to municipalities. We used these and other spatial data sets as input to the ForSys scenario planning model, explored multiple prioritization strategies and investigated both the amount of treated area and cost required to meet the national objectives. The results of the study can help guide fuel management planning at multiple scales in Portugal and align local priorities with national strategic goals.

Linear fuel breaks are constructed to decrease fire risk to human and natural resources by providing firefighters with a tactically selected pre-treated with reduced fuels, from which they can successfully engage with and control the fire’s edge. However, there are multiple co-benefits to fuel break placement that result from fire behavior modification and firefighter intervention. The objectives of this study are to determine these co-benefits or “alternative metrics” of fuel break success by consulting with and surveying fire managers across the state of California. To this end, we constructed an online survey using input from the literature and managers to measure practitioner perceptions of fuel break effectiveness. The survey was distributed using a snowball sampling method, yielding 48 unique responses (n=48) from fire managers employed by various management agencies in California. Survey results were analyzed to determine operational predictors of perceived alternative metrics of fuel break success. These metrics include, but are not limited to increased time for evacuations and improved aircraft effectiveness. Predictors include, but are not limited to whether the fuel break was used during firing operations and whether ground resources were assigned to the fuel break, respectively. Spatial data of these fuel break-wildfire encounters is currently being analyzed to determine construction predictors of alternative metrics of success including width, topographic position, and fuel type. Results demonstrate that fuel breaks are viewed by managers as multiple-purpose tools that can assist in the accomplishment of various objectives during operations.

FirEUrisk was designed to improve the protection of citizens exposed to wildfires, specifically extreme forest fires. FirEUrisk will develop a science-based and risk-wise strategy, which integrates forest fire prevention, suppression and restoration practices and policies in a holistic conceptual framework.
In the risk assessment studies, models and data were developed to estimate fire weather parameters as well the moisture content of different layers of vegetation, and are being tested using both satellite and ground data. A general fuel type classification methodology was proposed and a vegetation map of Europe with a resolution of 1 km2 was produced. Standard fuel models were assigned to each fuel type and are being improved and tested in pilot sites across Europe using satellite and historical fire data.
Vulnerability is estimated by considering the main variables affected by fire, including socio-economic values, ecosystem and ecological values. Landscape and social resilience to fire is estimated by developing a model that considers their coping capacity and regeneration potential. Exposure is considered, including both the location of the urban-wildland interface and smoke dispersion.
Other tasks of the project include the analysis of drivers leading to fire risk reduction, including different fuel reduction strategies and landscape management, as well as scenarios for future fire risk conditions, using both climate and land use change models. The project favours a close interaction with different users, managers and scientists through dedicated boards, as well as with other EU funded projects related to fire research. It considers cascading effects and policy recommendations.

The Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) has recently gained significant attention from wildfire policymakers and researchers. The proximity of human settlements to the wildland has brought harmful impacts to this area since humans cause the majority of fires. On top of that, climate change has been aggravating fire activity worldwide, like Portugal, which faces yearly dramatic wildfire seasons with uncountable material and human losses. Recently, in 2017, Portugal encountered one of the worse wildfire seasons in its history, which burned almost six percent of its territory. In this context, this study aims to compute wildfire hazards considering the 30-year weather prediction for Central Portugal and compare it with the impact caused by the 2017 wildfires in this region. The year 2017 was chosen because it represents an event with extreme meteorological circumstances that most assemble the future climate change scenario for this area. The methodology will consist in simulating the wildfire for future and past (2017) scenarios for the same location, using Wildfire Analyst. It will be collected the flame intensity, flame height, and fire arrival time for each building in the WUI zone and then estimate the overall impact. As a result, we expect that the comparison between the future and past scenarios can demonstrate a more realistic outcome of what the future will look like for Portugal and can assist in creating efficient management policies to mitigate the risks for the built environment in that area.

Objective:
In the field of wildfire strategic analysis, it is proposed to identify the lessons learned about the conditions that influence fire behaviour, and to use them to improve wildfire preparedness and management procedures through the elaboration of post-fire analysis reports.
Methodology:
A protocol is defined for data collection and analysis of variables that influence fire behavior, such as topography, fuels, fire defense infrastructures and the presence of wildland-urban interface. Historical fires and their behavior are studied too. An exhaustive analysis of the meteorology before and during the fire is also carried out. Sequential perimeters of fire advance are identified, and their behavior is correlated to each of these variables. Finally, post-fire severity is calculated to associate the behavior with level of vegetation damage.
This analysis is reflected in a document with a standardized format and known by the entire organization, which allows to quickly identify each of the variables that affect fire behavior in each fire.
Results:
The most important lessons learned from each fire have been identified, which represent an advance in the collective knowledge of the mechanisms that define fire behavior, including the sources of information to be analyzed to identify them, as in the case of convective behavior.
Conclusion:
The results obtained are useful for the training and preparedness of fire prevention and firefighting organizations, especially the team of analysts, in all phases of integrated fire management, planning, fire defense and post-fire actions

Context This study applies a simple, time-saving approach to highlight high and low exposure zones that can help managers plan mitigation actions at national and sub-national scales, especially in the Wild Urban interface. Objectives The objectives of this study are to apply a landscape fuel metric (Beverly et al., 2010 and 2021) developed in Canada to map wildfire exposure in Portugal and to validate that approach by examining exposure ratings within subsequently burned areas in Portugal. Methods We mapped exposure to hazardous fuels in Portugal using a neighborhood analysis. The exposure is estimated by the proportion of neighborhood cells in a landscape grid that contains hazardous fuel types. The resulting exposure metric assesses the extent of land cover type in the vicinity of a location that either contributes to or resists fire transmission. Our assessment included the temporal change between 1995 and 2018 using Corrine land cover. Burned areas following the assessment year were overlaid to validate the exposure assessment. Results:The distribution of exposure levels has been remarkably stable over time. Burned areas occur preferentially in high-exposure areas. In all five assessment years, the majority of burned areas had pre-fire exposure ≥ 80%. WUI present in ≥ 60% exposure class rates communities at higher exposure to build community's capacity in terms of preparedness. Conclusions:Exposure to hazardous fuels aligns well with subsequent fires. It is a simple, cost-effective, and time-saving metric to locate the high-risk areas on the map that could be followed by a field survey for fuel reduction treatments.

Record-breaking wildfires over 40,000 km2 (affecting 30% percent of the biome) in 2020 reached the Pantanal, a vast and well-preserved tropical wetland, shared between Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. While fires have been occurring in the Pantanal for millennia, their area has increased by 376% since 2000 compared to the annual average of the area burnt annually in the last two decades. Moreover, 43% of the area affected in 2020 (over 17,200 km2) had not been burnt previously in the last two decades. Worsening climatic conditions, including drought (severe drought decreased water levels) with the presence of dry fuel along riverbeds (the fire corridor was in the Paraguay River flood zone); constraints on firefighters due to COVID-19 and budget cuts; lack of fire prevention strategy; and land use changes all contributed to this increase. Wildfires are currently tackled in an ad-hoc fashion, and we advocate for socio-ecologically sensitive Integrative Fire Management involving permanent fire brigades, including indigenous members for conducting year-round fire management and communities cooperating to create a collaborative network for wildfire prevention. The local and national response regarding the wildfires was considerable. During the disastrous wildfires, several new research networks were organised and plan integrated actions on preventing fire disasters with training manage fire brigades at key locations throughout the Pantanal. After these mega-fires it was clear that prioritization for fire management and restoration of fire-sensitive species of key areas is urgent as well as financial investment over time to prevent this catastrophe from happening again.

The Biological Reserve (REBio) of Guaporé is a conservation unit (UC) created with the objective of conserving the transition environments between the Cerrado and Amazon biome, a mosaic of environments with different responses to forest fires. The UC is hit annually by anthropic and natural forest fires that end up reaching sensitive areas to fire, such as riparian forests and buritizais. Considering this scenario, the present work aimed to elaborate an integrated fire management plan (PMIF) for REBio Guaporé, aiming at reducing the occurrence of severe fires and the environmental damage they cause. For the preparation of the PMIF, the knowledge of the local population through community meetings, mapping of areas affected by fires in the last 11 years, the response to fire in different environments, accessibility of the affected area and objectives for the use of fire were considered. The PMIF generated a zoning of the unit according to the relationship between the environment and fire and defined the management actions for each zone. An activation protocol for fire-fighting actions was prepared and the need to train community members for good practices in the use of fire was identified. From the PMIF, fire should be used as a management tool to restore degraded areas, create mosaics in the landscape, manage the volume of combustible material, protect sensitive areas, and reconcile the conservation of biodiversity and the presence of existing traditional populations within the UC.

The Brazilian Indigenous Lands are protected by the Federal Brigades-BRIFs Program of the Prevfogo Center, linked to Ibama. Despite investments in financial, human and material resources, large fires still persist in tropical forests, driven by climate change. One of the most critical areas is the Araribóia Indigenous Land in the state of Maranhão, with a vast history of complex and costly combat operations. The area has high ethnoenvironmental importance, due to the presence of the Awá-Guajá, the most threatened ethnic group in the world. In disagreement with the experts' forecasts, the Araribóia IT has not suffered any major fires in the last two years. By analyzing the management differences implemented recently, we found that success is directly related to prevention and preparation activities focused on the improvement of indigenous brigades and the approximation with communities. The performance of various environmental education activities, the continuous training of brigadists and constant monitoring resulted in the reduction of risks and response time, ensuring the rapid control of fires. The valorization of indigenous peoples also involves stimulating the development of self-esteem and empowerment, in order to assume fire management in an efficient, effective and effective way. We conclude that strategies focused on the human being are still a bottleneck of the programs carried out with these communities. The success of this program demonstrates that these strategies are more important and efficient than the high investments in equipment and technology, recommended by many technicians who work in the protection of forest fires.

Wildfire susceptibility models for agricultural lands could help to create more reliable and dynamic fuel type mapping for Portugal, specially to classify unburned fuels, which is crucial for simulating fire behavior across the landscape. Spatial modeling of the agricultural areas prone to fires or susceptible to burn is inherently complex, and requires the analysis of various conditioning factors. This work presents a model to predict monthly wildfire occurrence probability in agricultural land use areas in mainland of Portugal. For modeling purposes, a Geographical Information System (GIS) database was built, including three predictors (distance to artificialized territories, slope and drought conditions based on Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) from Sentinel 2 time series), the agricultural land use data of the COS18 (Carta de Ocupação do Solo) and COSSim2020 and data of burned area perimeters from the Portuguese Forest Service from 2017 to 2021 extracted for the main summer fire season. The results showed that the predictive ability of the Random Forest (RF) model were slightly better than other benchmark models as classification trees and logistic models. RF performance yielded overall accuracies that varied between 55% and 76% by agricultural class and by month. The models could facilitate a better attribution of the fuel model in agricultural areas. These results are also instrumental to quantify the uncertainty of fuelmaps in fire behavior simulators.

A primary focus of integrated fire management is to reduce the impacts of wildfires on people. Communities in fire-prone areas must be aware of the impacts wildfires may have on lives, livelihoods, properties and infrastructure to reduce risks, prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfires.
This study aims to assess the profile of the WUI wildfire topic in European Union (EU) and non-EU countries characterised by dry vegetation environments. It analysed different fire-prone areas worldwide to assess similarities and differences in the number of wildfires affecting human settlements, the intensity of the wildfires at the WUI and the types of built-up areas affected by them.
The work used the datasets on built-up areas provided by the European JRC GHSL - Global Human Settlement Layer and the datasets on wildfires provided by the JRC GWIS - Global Wildfire Information System. The analyses were run using the GHSL Data Package datasets for the period 2017 – 2020, which adopt a 10m spatial resolution and the INSPIRE definitions of building, allowing the research to be inclusive to rural domain settlements and temporary settlements as associated with informal settlements, rapid migratory patterns, or people displaced by natural disasters.
Framing the impacts of WUI wildfires in different fire-prone areas allows for evaluating the global perspective of the WUI wildfires topic and facilitates the identification of common solutions to increase awareness, preparedness and mitigation capacity in local authorities and communities.

The purpouse of this abstract is to show the amount of prescribed burn areas and wildfire burned areas in Xerente and Funil a indigenous land in 2022.

The National Center for Wildfire Prevention and Suppression (Prevfogo), a specialized department of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), acts in the indigenous land of Xerente/Funil under the local coordination of the state of Tocantins. In 2022, the Xerente indigenous federal brigade was formed by 55 men, most of them indigenous. They were hired through a public selection process and trained to work with wildfire prevention and suppression.

The local coordination of Tocantins initiated the production of fuel load maps, separating green vegetation from dry vegetation in all of Apinayé’s territory in May 2022, which is the end of the rainy season.

The brigade, owning those maps, started the annual operational season with the execution of Prescribed Burn Plans, followed by wildfire incident suppression.

The results reached by the brigade, in terms of executed prescribed burns between May 10 and July 26, from 399 Prescribed Burns Plans, totaled almost 67,204 hectares of managed area. As for the wildfire suppression, there were 58 Wildfire Occurrence Registers, with a total of 44,417 hectares burned.

Those results indicate the need for a major comprehension of the traditional use of fire dynamics by the indigenous people, as well as a big attention to the establishment and fulfillment of the annual use of fire calendar.