Post-Fire Management in the Mediterranean Basin

Mediterranean countries have a long-standing afforestation tradition, at least since the 19th century, and especially the mid-20th century. Large forest fires started to occur in the late 1970s, and the routine post-fire restoration approach involved planting pines and building check dams according to the prevailing forest management practices at the time. Increasing short-interval recurrent wildfires have threatened the persistence of pine plantations. In the last two decades, post-fire restoration practices have increasingly diversified in both number of plant species used in plantations and type of restoration actions taken. In an attempt to provide a comprehensive post-fire restoration strategy, we are developing and testing a new protocol that includes scientific knowledge provided by fire and restoration ecology of recent decades. For regional planning, fire-vulnerable forests and shrublands are identified according to vegetation resilience and post-fire erosion risk using a GIS-based approach. Vege...