Green has returned to the mountains in the north of the province of Alicante, where a fire caused by lightning destroyed 20,000 hectares last August. Although the flames threatened several towns, the municipality of Vall d’Ebo was the one that gave its name to an inferno that, fortunately, did not cause any personal damage. The president of the Spanish Soil Science Society, Jorge Mataix-Solera, has just visited the area, where water and the rocky structure of the soil are contributing to rapid recovery. But the deep scars of the incident show that the prevention of forest fires must be carried out throughout the year. “In Spain, as in the entire Western Mediterranean, the forest area is growing,” recalls the researcher. Good news for the environment hiding a poison dart inside, increasing the chances of a catastrophic fire. “And we are waiting for it, we have been lucky that in Spain there have not been accidents with a large number of deaths, as has happened in Greece or Portugal,” Mataix-Solera warns.
“In just three months,” says the professor of Edaphology, the science that studies the soil, at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (Alicante), “in general we can see that the vegetation is recovering” in the affected mountains. In part, because Vall d’Ebo “has a lot of water, [es el municipio de la Comunidad Valenciana con más lluvia acumulada este año]”, but also because “one of the most dominant soils in the area is terrarossa, a soil that, although skeletal, is protected between the cracks in the rock from which it was formed, which protect it from erosion”. And that, due to its characteristics, “it responds well to fire, it is less susceptible to flames making it hydrophobic, that is, water repellent, and therefore more erodible.” In the mountains of Alicante, the department of the Alicante scientist studies recurrence in areas “burned several times in the last 20 or 25 years, in which not even the pine has had time to reach the age of being able to produce seed.” They are also investigating “the importance of moss, since it protects the soil as if it were a carpet and reactivates it biologically.” “You have to be very careful with it,” he warns, “just like with the extraction of burned wood, which damages the soil a lot and it is preferable to wait a while.”
Claims such as those this summer in Vall d’Ebo (Alicante), Bejís (Castellón) or Zamora once again require urgent intervention. “The abundance and magnitude of the fires is not only due to climate change, but also to the abandonment of agricultural use for decades,” continues Mataix-Solera. “There are currently large pine forests that colonize the old agricultural terraces, which functioned as firebreaks, and urbanizations that are built within a forest mass that constitute a material risk and, above all, for people.” As prevention, she considers it “necessary” to create “multidisciplinary work teams made up of foresters, ecologists, botanists, environmentalists, geographers and, of course, soil scientists.”
Mataix-Solera proposes “the reactivation of land uses in rural areas, such as agriculture and livestock, always in a sustainable manner, the diversification of the landscape, towards a greater, more heterogeneous plant mosaic” and prescribed burning, low-intensity fires in strategic sites that are carried out at times when the impact of fire is less. These burns are “another tool that has been used more frequently in Spain in recent years, although in the southeast of Spain it is perhaps more complicated because we have fewer days with favorable conditions to be able to carry it out without risk,” she explains. “Forestry technicians know in advance how to apply it, they have mathematical models that indicate what the prescription windows are, based on characteristics such as atmospheric phenomena, the slope of the terrain or the accumulated fuel load”, he continues. “The impacts are minor both on the landscape and on the ground and the fuel that is dry and dead is mostly eliminated.”
The intervention of specialists in areas that have burned is divided into two parts. In what is not burned, “landscape strategies must be undertaken in which the fuel load is reduced in strategic areas.” As an example, he points out “the collection of biomass as fuel and the adequacy of municipal buildings so that they consume it as an energy source.” Or “carry out sustainable agricultural practices that, through the farmed plots, always respectful of the system, create discontinuity in the forest mass and, thus, reduce the impact of fire, which we must not forget is part of the environment and is inevitable , above all, aggravated by the extreme conditions” in which we find ourselves.
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In the burned, in the short term, “the most worrying thing is the soil,” he says. After a large fire, he is left naked and therefore more vulnerable. “We must analyze the areas where this vulnerability is greatest and develop actions to protect it from degradation, such as spreading a thin cover of straw mulch or wood chips in areas at risk of erosion, which may come from silvicultural treatments of the environment. near”. In the medium term, it is necessary to “study how the vegetation regenerates and act only if necessary, because it is not always essential to reforest.” In the long term, finally, “we must try to have a resilient forest” that makes disaster difficult. “The climate is changing, and we cannot expect to return to having the same forests that we have now in a period of decades, so much vegetation will not be able to resist in different and such extreme conditions,” he settles.
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