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Description
The project includes an area of 113,9 acres with reduced susceptibility to desertification. The purpose of the project is to strengthen climate change adaptation by promoting forest areas resilience, responsiveness and adaptation to expected future climate change, and mitigate land degradation and desertification in burnt areas. This will be achieved by investigating land degradation risk for future climate and land use scenarios. The project promotes stakeholders'' engagement on the definition and assessment of future forest management strategies and definition of future climate and climate-defined-fire-risk scenarios, design of alternative forest management scenarios / pilot-projects, forest fires simulation for future climates under alternative forest management strategies and land degradation and post-fire soil erosion risk assessment. Stakeholders and policymakers will benefit from the work developed in this project in terms of decision making tools such as fire risk databases and maps, land use changes databases and maps, fire spread databases and maps, post fire soil erosion risk databases and maps.
Summary of project results
The FORES project aimed to promote the resilience of forest areas, capacity to respond and adapt to climate change, testing different forest management strategies to determine which one maximizes the resilience of forest areas to the spread of forest fires, CO2 sequestration capacity and soil moisture retention. To achieve this, a coupled atmosphere-land-vegetation-fire (WRF-SFIRE) modeling system was implemented at the regional/local level.
FoRES has also contributed to mitigating soil degradation and desertification in burned areas by investigating the risk of soil degradation under future climate and land use scenarios, with a special focus on fire severity, vegetation/soil resilience and post erosion. -fire, including emergency stabilization measures.The LFIR study area (Lombada Forest Intervention Zone) comprises 650 ha classified as dry/sub-humid and is part of the network of Integrated Landscape Management Areas (AIGP), NUTS III Terras de Trás-os-Montes, RNAP (Network National Protected Areas - Montesinho Natural Park) and RN2000 (Natura 2000 Network - Montesinho / Nogueira site). Furthermore, LFIR is a priority in the DFCIF plan (National Forest Fire Defense Plan).
FoRES relied on a strong collaboration between academic partners and local/regional stakeholders and the activities included: first, key stakeholders, including the management entity of LFIR (APATA) and team members discussed future land / vegetation cover scenarios planned for LFIR (Activity A1.1). At the same time, future high fire weather risk episodes occurring at LFIR based in the latest IPCC future climate change scenarios from the CMIP6 project were identified (Activity A2). Three pilot-projects (alternative forest management strategies) were designed, prioritizing vegetation species with lower fire propagation potential, higher capacity for CO2 sequestration and soil moisture retention (Activity A3). Then, fire ignitions in the high fire risk episodes from Activity A2 were simulated, where input data related to biomass load, species flammability, land use and other vegetation/fuel characteristics that reflect the different forest management strategies designed in Activity A3 feed the WRF-SFIRE modelling framework to estimate the fire severity and spread area under the different types of forest management (Activity A4). These results then were used to predict land degradation risk for future wildfire, climate and land-cover scenarios, with special focus on post-fire erosion and emergency stabilization measures (Activity A5). Finally, all the obtained results in the previous activities for the three
pilot-projects (alternative forest management strategies) were presented and discussed with the stakeholders and relevant policymakers to adapt the planned forest management plans to maximize forests resilience to fires (Activities A1.2 and A1.3).
The project included discussion of future forest management scenarios planned for the LFIR and identification of future episodes of high fire risk in the LFIR, based on the latest IPCC climate change scenarios from the CMIP6 project. The project developed three pilot projects for alternative forest management strategies, prioritizing vegetation species with lower fire propagation potential, greater CO2 sequestration capacity and soil moisture retention.
Fire ignitions were simulated in the high fire risk episodes identified for the different forest management strategies, which fed into the WRF-SFIRE modeling system to estimate the severity and area of fire spread under the different forest management scenarios.
These results allowed to predict the risk of soil degradation in future rural fires, with a special focus on post-fire erosion and emergency stabilization measures. All results obtained were presented and discussed with relevant stakeholders to adapt forest management plans and maximize the resilience of forests to rural fires.
Summary of bilateral results
The project contributed to bilateral relations, with the presence of a Norwegian partner, NIBIO - Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, which was involved in studying soil degradation and assessing the risk of post-fire soil erosion.