Abstract:

Wildfires are expected to increase in Mediterranean landscapes as a result of climate change and changes in land-use practices. In order to advance our understanding of human and physical factors shaping spatial patterns of wildfires in the region, we compared two independently generated datasets of wildfires for Israel that cover approximately the same study period. We generated a site-based dataset containing the location of 10,879 wildfires (1991–2011), and compared it to a dataset of burnt areas derived from MODIS imagery (2000–2011). We hypothesized that the physical and human factors explaining the spatial distribution of burnt areas derived from remote sensing (mostly large fires, >100 ha) will differ from those explaining site-based wildfires recorded by national agencies (mostly small fires, <10 ha). Small wildfires recorded by forestry agencies were concentrated within planted forests and near built-up areas, whereas the largest wildfires were located in more remote region

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