Objective
FIRE TORCH project constitutes a new and logical step in prescribed burning research, essential to expand and consolidate its use in Europe.
This two year long project has four general objectives:
- To identify and analyze the opportunities for prescribed fire development;
- to model prescribed burning environmental effects and operational know-how;
- to conceive and develop a Decision Support System focusing the different stages of a burning operation: prescription, execution and evaluation.
- to contribute to the technique diffusion and practitioners training.
The specificity of FIRE TORCH is to associate very tightly experimental and management burns, profiting from past experience and integrating the currently available scientific and technical knowledge on prescribed burning. This implies (i) a process of compiling, completing, synthesizing and organizing information, and (ii) a change in the experiments spatial scale, from the former plot level to the larger operational (management) level.
The basic research component of the project will be focused on two types of knowledge gaps, (i) the replacement of qualitative by quantitative knowledge on the operational issues of planning and evaluation, and (ii) the study of prescribed burning effects when using it at the management scale (soil water infiltration and fertility, wildlife and landscape structure).
The objectives of the project will be attained through different approaches, according to the degree of prescribed burning development in each country of Southern Europe, (i) lack of use, (ii) experimental, sporadic or local utilization, or (iii) extensive and expanding use.
The activities will be developed in experimental tasks (T1, T2, T3, T4, T5), modeling tasks (T5, T6, T7) and validation tasks (T7). The tasks T2, T3 and T7 will ensure the overall project coherence.
The project is multidisciplinary (forest researchers and managers, biologists, ecologists and computer scientists) and will regroup teams from Portugal, France, Spain. Italy and Greece.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
5000-911 VILA REAL
Portugal