Figure 1.
Location of Catalonia in the European context (A).
Dynamic land cover types in the year 2000 (B, see Appendix S2 for further information) with forest areas (in light grey) and shrublands (in dark grey). Representation of wildfires that occurred between 1975 and 1988 (light grey), between 1989 and 1999 (dark grey) and wildfires occurred between 2000 and 2010 (black) (C). Following [36], Catalonia is divided in three bioclimatic regions: North-West (NW), North-East (NE) and South-Central (SC).
Figure 2.
Conceptual design of the MEDFIRE model.
Land cover type and time since last fire are state variables. The fire sub-model is responsible for updating time since last fire, whereas land cover type is updated in the vegetation dynamics sub-model. Fire processes occur sequentially until the annual target area is burnt. After that, the vegetation dynamics sub-model takes place to complete the annual cycle.
Figure 3.
Description of the effects of opportunistic fire suppression on effective fire size.
(A) Historic fires in a region, where black patches show recent burns with time since last fire values lower than 15 years and grey patches correspond to older fires. (B) Fire spread of a new simulated fire in the area. Potential target area (black thick line) is larger than the effective area burnt (white filling within the target area) because of opportunistic firefighting opportunities generated by recent fires in (A). Suppressed areas are shown in grey and main spread axes are shown in arrows. Spread occurring within effective area burnt (black arrows) and potentially, within the suppressed area (white arrows) is shown.
Table 1.
Definition of the nine fire suppression treatments as combinations of firefighting strategies.
Figure 4.
Statistical distributions for the total area burnt (A) and the percentage of area burnt by large fires (B) obtained after 100 simulations of the MEDFIRE model for the 1989–1999 period.
Results are presented for the whole study area (ALL) and for the three bioclimatic sub-regions: North-East (NE), North-West (NW:) and South-Central (SC). Black squared dots indicate the observed values of total area burnt (A) and the percentage of area burnt by large fires (B) as reported in official statistics for this period. For all boxplots, lower and upper whiskers encompass the 95% interval, lower and upper hinges indicate the first and third quartile and the central black line indicates the median value.
Figure 5.
Statistical distributions for the total area burnt (A, B, C, D) and the percentage of area burnt by large fires (E, F, G, H) obtained after 100 simulations of the MEDFIRE model for the 2000–2010 period.
Results are presented for the whole study area (ALL: plots A and E) and for the three bioclimatic sub-regions: North-East (NE: plots B and F), North-West (NW: plots C and G) and South-Central (SC: plots D and H). Scenarios without suppression are represented in white box-plots, opportunistic suppression scenarios in light grey, active suppression scenarios in medium grey and combined suppression scenarios in dark grey. Black horizontal lines indicate the observed values of total area burnt (A to D) or the percentage of area burnt by large fires (E to H) as reported in official statistics. Lower and upper whiskers indicate the 5% and 95% quartiles, lower and upper hinges indicate the first and third quartile and the central black line indicates the median value.
Figure 6.
Statistical distributions for the total area burnt (A, B, C) and the percentage of area burnt by large fires (D, E, F), obtained after 100 twenty-year simulations of the MEDFIRE model under different fire regime scenarios.
Scenarios were defined by combining climate treatments (C0, C1 and C2; defined in the main text) and fire suppression treatments (0, iii, vi, vii, viii; defined in Table 1). Lower and upper whiskers indicate the 5% and 95% quartiles, lower and upper hinges indicate the first and third quartile and the central black line indicates the median value.