Citation

Badia A, Gisbert M. Appl. Geogr. 2020; 114: e102134.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.apgeog.2019.102134

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The fires of 2017 in Valparaíso, Chile, and Pedrógão Grande, Portugal, and the fires of 2018 in Mati, Greece, and California, United States, with chilling figures of fatalities, highlight the impossibility of managing the intensity of fires that currently affect the forests and, especially, wildland-urban interfaces (WUI). Scientists have begun to investigate the phenomenon of WUI during the early 1970s in the United States (Butler, 1976). However, WUI was not considered a complex problem to be solved until the early 1990s, due to the growing concern about the proliferation of human settlements in forest environments (Weise & Wotton, 2010). WUI refers to the spatial coincidence of two territorial subsystems—social or urban, and rural or forest—and the interactions established between them. It is worth mentioning that it is extremely difficult to determine the boundary between urban and natural spaces. As a result, there are areas where inhabited human structures overlap with areas that are mainly forests (Davis, 1990; Stewart, Radeloff, Hammer, & Hawbaker, 2007; USDA, 2001). The emergence of the European Observatory for the prevention and defence against forest fires affecting WUI (Wildland-Urban Interface Forest Fire Risk Observatory and Interest Group in Europe [WUIWATCH, 2017] of the European Commission), highlights the interest and concern about WUI fires.

WUI started to be considered a new type of land use that needs new regulations (Caballero, 2017). Fires are no longer having that regulatory role of land uses in order to reduce continuous forest stands or to obtain farmlands. This way, fires become a major enemy. Landscapes traditionally occupied by farmlands, pastures, or little dense forests, become landscapes where urban uses are confused with forest uses. Consequently, they become much more vulnerable to forest fires ...

Language: en