Join FIREPOL’s next seminar “The influence of protected area statuses and transitions on global fire activity” on Monday October 5th at 11.30 AM.

In person: Castello del Valentino Torino – Sala Vigliano
Online: Zoom

Speaker:
VÍCTOR FERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA
Research Fellow at the University of Lausanne.

Fernández-García is an ecologist and pyrogeographer. His research focuses on wildfires and their interactions with ecosystems and societies, with particular attention to fire regimes, their spatial and temporal dynamics, and their environmental consequences.

Abstract:
Protected areas are central to global biodiversity conservation, but their influence on fire activity remains poorly understood and may vary substantially across ecosystems and geographical contexts. Changes in protected-area status may also modify land management and human pressures, potentially affecting fire regimes.

The seminar will present a global assessment of how protected-area status and transitions are associated with burned area across country × ecoregion units. First, it will examine differences in fire activity between currently protected areas and environmentally and socioeconomically similar unprotected controls, distinguishing between non-forest lands and forests. Second, it will investigate changes associated with transitions in protected-area status, including the establishment of protection and protected-area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement. Preliminary results reveal contrasting patterns across land-cover types: globally, burned area tends to be higher within protected natural and semi-natural lands, whereas protected forests show lower burned area than comparable unprotected forests, particularly in tropical moist forests. These relationships are highly heterogeneous across biomes and geographical regions. The seminar will also explore environmental and human factors potentially underlying this variation, including fire-weather conditions, land cover change, population dynamics and governance effectiveness.