Prescribed burning in southern Europe: developing fire management in a dynamic landscape

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America S European landscapes are fire-prone due to the Mediterranean climate, the presence of flammable vegetation, and the rugged terrain (Pausas et al. 2008). The environmental and societal impacts of fire in the region have increased markedly during the 20th century. Pre-industrial fire regimes were generally associated with widespread agropastoral land use and low-severity burning in heterogeneous shrublands and open woodland landscapes (Seijo and Gray 2012). Pronounced changes leading to greater fire risk have since occurred as a result of socioeconomic and political factors that led to agricultural decline, abandonment, and mechanization; rural depopulation; large-scale afforestation; poor forest management; accumulation of biomass (fuel) in shrublands; land-use conflicts; and the expansion of urban areas (Birot 2009; Moreira et al. 2011; Seijo and Gray 2012). These processes present southern European countries with a unique fire management challenge in the context of a landscape still undergoing rapid change. The severity of contemporary (post-1960s) fire regimes is also the result of climatic changes, including both generally hotter, drier weather and more frequent and extreme episodes of drought (Seidl et al. 2011), as well as modern fire suppression strategies that have further contributed to the increase in fuel (Piñol et al. 2007). An increase in the number and size of large fires (that account for most of the area burned) in the Mediterranean region suggests that fire regimes have shifted from fuel-limited to weather-driven (Pausas and Fernández-Muñoz 2011). However, fire management policies in southern Europe remain strongly biased toward fire suppression and largely disregard the structural (socioeconomic and land management) roots of the problem (Birot 2009). Prescribed burning (PB) is the planned use of fire to achieve precise and clearly defined objectives. In Europe this can be distinguished from the more haphazard use of fire in traditional agriculture, for example in the manageONLINE SPECIAL ISSUE: Prescribed burning