Màster MSc in Spatial and Ecological modelling in European Forestry Erasmus Mundus
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Treballs de fi de màster en Spatial and Ecological Modelling in European Forestry Erasmus Mundus de l'Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Agrària [Més informació]
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- ItemOpen AccessAnticipating future extreme wildfire events by predicting ignition probability and success of initial attack in Catalunya(2022) Catelo, Gabrielle FelliceIn recent years, the EU has implemented several firefighting-related policies to battle and reduce the negative impacts of wildfires. However, the changing environment constantly surprises us with extreme events that cause massive losses for the entire Europe, with the Mediterranean region increasing its vulnerability to these risks. Recently, the wildfire season for the region was observed to have lengthened, and along with the rapid change in fire-weather factors, resulted to extreme wildfire events. As of 2022, total burned area for the EU is recorded to be approx. 792,902 (66% forest). It has long been recognized that the Mediterranean cultural landscape is fire-prone, hence decision-makers ensure that responses and solutions are devoted at mitigating and reducing fire risk. With the advocacy of a paradigm shift to coexist with fire, anticipation of fire incidents is the best approach partnered with comprehensive management. Various studies on wildfires provide geospatial insights and models to foresee fire occurrence, burning extent, success in initial attack, ignition probability, etc. This study aims to recognize and understand wildfire activity by forecasting the occurrence of extreme wildfire events in the near future. The approach is based on coupling ignition and escape models to climate and land cover change projections from Copernicus (C3S) and Socio-economic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) to outline the spatial distribution of wildfires up to 2050. We calibrated a series of binary regression models upon historical records of wildfire ignition in Catalonia (Northeast of Spain) using machine learning techniques under different land cover change and climate scenarios. Disaster risk reduction will be improved through this prediction by identifying wildfire management zones and prioritization of areas (Rodrigues et al., 2022).
- ItemOpen AccessConnectivity of protected areas in Colombia: Identification and prioritization of potential corridors(2022) Pineda Zapata, SaraColombia is a megadiverse country that has suffered from high rates of deforestation threatening the ecosystems inside and outside protected areas. Consequently, the habitat for different forest species is becoming more fragmented, which may affect ecological processes such as pollination, gene flow, breeding, seed dispersal, among others. Therefore, it is crucial to improve the connectivity of habitat patches, which can be achieved by the identification and conservation of ecological corridors. In this study, we carried out a Least Cost path (LCP) analysis to identify potential ecological corridors between forested protected areas in Colombia. First, we identified a set of representative 16 threatened mammal species that were classified into four ecological profiles based on their preferred land cover type, altitudinal range, and their dispersal capacities. Then, we generated landscape resistance surfaces for each ecological profile and identified potential LCP corridors within and between protected areas that minimized resistance to dispersal of the species within each of these profiles. We prioritized the resulting potential corridors to identify those with higher priority for conservation by using the decrease in Probability of Connectivity index (dPC). Our findings suggest that the conservation of big forest patches inside protected areas tend to be more important than the conservation of corridors between them for species inhabiting lowland and sub-Andean forests, especially for habitat patches located in the Amazon region. However, for species inhabiting Andean and high Andean forests, our results suggest that restoration measures to increase forest cover between protected areas and therefore increase the permeability of the landscape matrix to species dispersal, will be key for their conservation. The results of our study can be used by different decision makers to identify priorities of conservation for in current protected areas and their surrounding forest habitats in Colombia. Furthermore, our results can also be used to prioritize areas where more detailed studies for conservation actions are needed. Additionally, we presented a methodology to group species with similar ecological needs in a context of data scarcity, that can be further applied in other large scale connectivity exercises.