Survival of prescribed burning treatments to wildfire in Portugal

Adoption of prescribed burning is increasing as the treatment chosen to decrease fuel hazard in southern Europe but little is known about how it affects wildfire activity. We assessed the effectiveness of prescribed burning treatments by analysing the survival of treatment units to wildfire in mainland Portugal (2005-2017). We examined the time-dependency of treatment-wildfire encounters through survival analysis, and evaluated treatment effectiveness as the intersection outcome in terms of the unburned fraction of the treatment. Generalized linear modelling supplemented by regression tree analysis was used to attain the second objective. Prescribed fire treatments were frequently (42% of the total number of units) intersected by wildfire, which occurs soon after treatment: the probability of an encounter peaked 2 years after treatment and its cumulative value grew at a diminishing rate with fuel age. Of all treated units, 58% burned entirely upon encounter and the median unburned fraction was 0.01 owing to the prevalence of intersections with large and presumably fast spreading and high intensity wildfires. Larger treatments burned less in area but the effect of wildfire characteristics was largely prevalent over the effect of treatment size. The unburned fraction of treated units seldom responded to fuel age, which we discuss based on biophysical influences, treatment effort, and fire suppression strategy. The high encounter rate but low effectiveness in decreasing burned area within treatments and, seemingly, nil effect for practical purposes on wildfire size indicates that prescribed burning is not impacting wildfire extent in Portugal. Our findings indicate the need to scale-up prescribed burning activity to effectively contribute to decrease wildfire size, but also improvements in fire management planning and operations in general.

Automated summary

Prescribed burning is often intersected by wildfires in mainland Portugal, with a high encounter rate but low effectiveness in reducing burned area within treated units. The study suggests that prescribed burning does not significantly impact wildfire size in Portugal and highlights the need to scale up prescribed burning activity and improve fire management planning and operations.