Assessing the protective role of active agriculture in wildfire exposure in a Mediterranean region

Global change and rural abandonment are restructuring Mediterranean fire regimes, as landscapes once characterized by heterogeneous agricultural mosaics are progressively replaced by homogenized, drought-limited fuel complexes. This transformation increases the likelihood of high-intensity wildfire events and their associated impacts. This study applied a stochastic fire-spread modeling framework based on thousands of simulated wildfire events. We quantified the effects of land abandonment in the Matarranya region in eastern Spain, comparing current landscape conditions with a counterfactual “no-abandonment” scenario considering agricultural lands non-burnable in both cases. Results indicate that active agriculture serves as a critical passive infrastructure protection system by maintaining fuel discontinuity, yielding a 68% mean reduction in building exposure ( β = 0.32). Conversely, land abandonment functions as an exposure multiplier, triggering a 7-fold increase in the number of structures reaching high and very high burn probability threshold. Abandonment also raises burning intensity (flame length), which limits suppression capability. Overall, the cessation of management roughly tripled potential fire size and quadrupled exposure of human infrastructure, highlighting the importance of identifying “high-leverage plots” where targeted agricultural restoration maximizes safety. By strategically prioritizing these parcels, planners can transform abandoned land into revenue-generating firebreaks and functional strategic fire zones (SFZs), establishing an evidence-based framework for rural development and wildfire risk mitigation.