Forest areas are defined by the Environment Blue Book and National Action Plan to Combat Climate Change (PANCD) programmes as key areas to investigate resilience and adaptation strategies to climate change and its impacts. Portugal has favourable characteristics for forest fires due to its Mediterranean/Atlantic climate, characterized by high temperatures, low humidity, strong winds and dry vegetation. Climate changes, which will bring increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as high temperatures, drought and desertification and fire weather risk, and land cover changes (in terms of vegetation characteristics), can have major effects on forest fires ignition and propagation potential in Portugal.
FoRES aims to strengthen climate change adaptation by promoting forest areas resilience, responsiveness and adaptation to expected future climate change by designing and testing alternative nature-based forest management strategies (pilot-projects) to determine those that maximize forest areas resilience to spatio-temporal propagation of forest fires, capacity for CO2 sequestration and soil moisture retention. This will be achieved by implementing an innovative, fully coupled atmosphere-land-vegetation-fire spread modelling framework (WRF-SFIRE) at regional/local level. FoRES will also contribute to mitigate land degradation and desertification in burnt areas by investigating land degradation risk for future climate and land use scenarios, with special focus on fire severity, vegetation/soil resilience and post-fire erosion, including emergency stabilization measures.
