A system to evaluate fire impacts from simulated fire behavior in Mediterranean areas of Central Chile.

Wildfires constitute the greatest economic disruption to Mediterranean ecosystems, from a socio-economic and ecological perspective (Molina et al., 2014). This study proposes to classify fire intensity levels based on potential fire behavior in different types of Mediterranean vegetation types, using two geographical scales. The study considered >4 thousand wildfires over a period of 25years, identifying fire behavior on each event, based on simulations using "KITRAL", a model developed in Chile in 1993 and currently used in the entire country. Fire intensity values allowed results to be classified into six fire effects categories (levels), each of them with field indicators linking energy values with damage related to burned vegetation and wildland urban interface zone. These indicators also facilitated a preliminary assessment of wildfire impact on different Mediterranean land uses and, are therefore, a useful tool to prioritize future interventions.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Science of the Total Environment

• Publication date

  2017-02-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.11.139PMID 27923572
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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