Land cover fire proneness in Europe

"Aim of study: The characterization of the fuels is an important aspect of the fire regime in each specific ecosystem while fire is an important disturbance for global vegetation dynamics. This study aims to identify and characterize the spatial and temporal evolution of the fire incidence and of the vegetation types that are most affected by forest fires in Europe, with emphasis on the mixed forests. Area of study: Europe. Material and methods: Corine Land Cover maps for 2000 and 2006 (CLC2000, CLC2006) and burned area (BA) perimeters, from 2000 to 2013 in Europe are combined to access the spatial and temporal evolution of the types of vegetation that are most affected by fires using geostatistics and Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques. Main results: The spatial and temporal distribution of BA perimeters, vegetation and burnt vegetation by fires was performed and different statistics were obtained for Mediterranean and northern Europe, confirming the usefulness of the used land cover classification. A fire proneness index (FPI) is proposed to assess the fire selectivity of land cover classes, to quantify and compare the propensity of vegetation classes and countries to fire. Research highlights: Mixed forests area is 5% of total European area but has increased 2.1% from 2000 to 2006, while other forest types followed an opposite trend. FPI for scrubs is twice (quadruple) of the value for the forests (agricultural areas) except during the occurrence of mega fire events, when the LCC of forest present higher FPI than the LCC of scrub"