Easy-to-interpret procedure to analyze fire seasonality and the influence of land use in fire occurrence: A case study in central Italy

Abstract

Fire frequency and fire seasonality are among the main components of the fire regime. In the Mediterranean Basin, climate directly drives fire occurrence, controlling fuel flammability and determining the fire-prone conditions, so that intense fires prevail during the dry and warm season of the year. However, humans also play a direct role in wildfire regimes, severely altering fuel features, fire policies and land-use management, as well as the timing and location of fire ignitions, to such an extent that anthropogenic activities have overcome the role of climate in shaping fire regimes. The main purpose of this work is to propose a graphical tool capable of identifying the most fire-prone portions of the territory and to explore the differences between the summer and winter fire risk; to this end, we analyzed the seasonal fire risk in the Latium region (central Italy) and its drivers in terms of land-use types, by using a fuel phenology framework. The results demonstrated that climate is not the main cause of bimodal seasonality in fire occurrence and that the existence of two annual fire seasons in Latium is strongly correlated with how humans use fire as a land management tool. The proposed approach may represent an easy-to-interpret pyrogeographical framework applicable in any environment and updatable over time, useful for identifying spatial gradients, and for recognizing fire regime temporal patterns.