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Dynamic global vegetation model
Fuel management
Future fire regimes
Climate adaptation
Land-use change
Abstract:
Climate and land-use change increasingly influence European fire regimes, creating new challenges for wildfire management. Fuel management strategies, such as prescribed burning and thinning, can alter the composition and distribution of fuels to mitigate wildfire risk. However, the effectiveness of fuel management depends on complex interactions among fuel types and the conditions governing wildfire ignition and spread. Alongside field studies, modelling provides opportunities to explore management priorities under different socioeconomic and climatic conditions. Here, we used a series of fuel-management sensitivity experiments to simulate the response of future wildfire behavior in Europe to five scenarios targeting different fuel size classes (1-, 10-, 100-, and 1000-hour fuels) under alternative land-use and climate futures. Land use was modelled under Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 1 and 3 using CLUMondo, and the resulting scenarios were used as inputs to the fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation model LPJmL-SPITFIRE together with corresponding climate projections. Results show that management targeting 1-hour (fine) fuels produced the largest reductions in burned area, rate of spread, and fire intensity, followed by mixed-fuel management. In contrast, removal of 10-, 100-, and 1000-hour (coarse) fuels did not consistently reduce wildfire behavior within the modelling framework. Treatment responses varied regionally, with southern Europe, the Baltics, and the Carpathian region showing higher sensitivity. We conclude that future wildfire behavior in Europe is particularly sensitive to the management of fine and mixed fuels, and that regionally adapted approaches targeting these fuel classes are likely to provide the greatest potential for reducing wildfire activity under future climate and land-use change.
