How can a forest landscape be designed to better withstand the impact of wildfires? Does it depend solely on vegetation type or climate? Or does it also depend on how people use the land? A research team at the University of Córdoba is working to answer these questions by analyzing large datasets on wildfires, their behavior, and their effects on the environment.
The ERSAF group (RNM360) – as part of the cross-border project REFLORESTA – is developing a complex forest landscape resilience index to analyze which variables can increase landscape resilience to such disturbances. The goal is to provide public authorities and land managers with technical criteria for designing more resilient forest landscapes in their restoration plans.
The aim is not to prevent fires altogether—which is difficult in Mediterranean ecosystems—but rather to reduce their severity, limit the damage, and facilitate the recovery of the land. “Fires will continue to happen,” explains Guillermo Palacios, a project member leading the research at the University of Córdoba, “but we can design landscapes that coexist better with them, slow their spread, and recover more quickly.”
One of the unique aspects of the project is its consideration of future climate change scenarios, a key factor in forest management. “We can't design a forest landscape based only on present conditions. The decisions we make today must anticipate the climate scenarios we’ll face 30, 40, or 50 years from now, when the forest we’re managing will need to be fully adapted,” Palacios notes.
The UCO team—comprising researchers Guillermo Palacios, Rafael Navarro, Miguel Ángel Lara, and Carlos Rivas—is working on the development and validation of this digital tool, which analyzes how wildfires have behaved in different environments over the past decades.
Using geographic, ecological, social, and economic data, the goal is to detect patterns that help assess the resilience level of a given landscape through machine learning models, a branch of artificial intelligence.
Designing this resilience index is a complex task requiring a multidisciplinary approach. “Defining what a resilient landscape is isn’t easy,” explains Palacios. “For a forest engineer, it's one that withstands fire and regenerates quickly after a wildfire. But for a local resident, it might be one that supports their livelihood, and for a public manager, perhaps one with greater scenic or tourism value,” he clarifies. “All these perspectives need to be reflected in the index and its calculation and mapping tools.”
That’s why, in addition to ecological data such as forest structure and composition, landscape fragmentation, or climate features, the index also considers social and economic factors such as accessibility, access roads, proximity to population centers, land use, or availability of firefighting resources.
Currently, the UCO team is holding meetings with experts from various fields (forest management, emergency response, rural economics, hydrology, among others) to validate the model and reach a shared definition of a “resilient landscape.” But the ultimate goal of the tool is to help turn data into concrete recommendations, such as creating vegetation patches with different levels of combustibility or introducing species that support effective regeneration after a fire.
The economic savings this tool can generate are hard to quantify, but the costs of a wildfire go far beyond the loss of trees. They affect water resources, carbon emissions, the landscape, tourism, wild product harvesting, and people’s safety. “Some impacts are visible right away; others show up decades later and far from the fire’s origin,” Palacios notes.
The model doesn’t replace human decision-making, but it does provide key information to improve it. The project aims to transfer its results so that relevant authorities can use the index to design and implement restoration plans based on this tool.
The REFLORESTA project, co-funded by Interreg POCTEP and the ERDF, is a cross-border collaboration between Spanish and Portuguese entities, bringing together governments, universities, companies, and forestry associations such as the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, the University of A Coruña, the regional governments of Castilla y León and Andalusia, AMAYA, and companies IDAF and Bóreas.
Ultimately, the challenge is to learn to coexist with fire and reduce its impact. To achieve that, it is essential to anticipate the conditions imposed by climate change and to design forest landscapes that are not only fire-resistant but also generate value for the people who live in them. As Palacios reminds us, “Forests require investment to maintain the ecosystem services they provide to society. If forest areas don’t also offer economic returns, it’s hard to sustain them. And that too is part of resilience.”
This report is included in the activities carried out in the project "Desarrollo de redes de asesoramiento y gestión de proyectos europeos I+D+i en la UCO" with acronym "DevelOPE", within the framework of grant GPE2023-001243-P financed by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/50110001103.