Fig 1.
Fire frequency (1999–2016) and land cover in the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba province, Argentina.
Fig 2.
Mean monthly temperature and rainfall in the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba province, Argentina.
Weather data (1999–2014) was provided by the National Weather Service of Argentina, Córdoba AERO weather station.
Fig 3.
Scatter plot of fire size vs. pre-fire FMC (left) in the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba (Argentina). Data from 2002 to 2016 (n = 86). Dashed lines indicate quantile regressions fitted for quantiles between 0.1 and 0.9. Slope coefficients for quantiles (black dots) and their confidence intervals (grey area) are shown on the right plot. The red lines are the least squares estimate and its confidence interval.
Table 1.
Summary statistics of average pre-fire FMC (one fire = one case) for different fire sizes in the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba, Argentina).
Fig 4.
Pre-fire FMC density plots for dominant land covers in the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba, Argentina.
Data from 2002–2016.
Table 2.
Summary statistics of pre-fire FMC for different land covers in the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba, Argentina.
Values represent fuelbed moisture content for grasslands and live fuel moisture content for forests and shrublands.
Fig 5.
Fuel moisture thresholds determined to assess fire hazard in dominant land covers of the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba (Argentina) and its comparison with the thresholds established by Weise et al. [29].
In grasslands, FMC represents the whole fuelbed (mix of live and dead fuels) and in forests and shrublands FMC represents live fuels.
Table 3.
Comparison of the percentages of burned pixels in dominant land covers classified in the categories of fire hazard proposed by Weise et al. [29] based on live fuel moisture content and the percentages classified in each category according to our classification based on percentiles.
Fig 6.
Average fuel moisture content (FMC) values through the fire season for different land cover types in the Sierras Chicas in Córdoba (Argentina) and their comparison with land cover specific fire hazard thresholds.
Average FMC of all years included data from 2002 to 2015. Average FMC for high fire activity years (burned area higher than 3% of total area) included: 2003, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2013, and average FMC for low fire activity (burned area lower than 1%) included: 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2015. The error bars represent average standard deviation. Dotted horizontal lines indicate the upper limit of extreme (red), high (orange) and moderate fire hazard thresholds (yellow). For reference, the first day of each month corresponds to the following days of year: 152 (June), 185 (July), 213 (August), 244 (September), 274 (October), 305 (November) and 335 (December).