Quantifying economic losses from wildfires in black pine afforestations of northern Spain

- We quantify economic losses from wildfires in black pine afforestation.
- A fire modeling approach accounting for historic ignition probability and extreme fire weather was used to assess wildfire exposure at fine resolution.
- We used successional stage specific response functions and timber prices.
- Wildfire exposure and potential losses showed stand specific complex spatial patterns.
- Results can help policy making and managing wildfire risk at individual stand level.

We implemented a fire risk assessment framework that combines spatially-explicit burn probabilities, post-fire mortality models and public auction timber prices, to estimate expected economic losses from wildfires in 155 black pine stands covering about 450 ha in the Juslapeña Valley of central Navarra, northern Spain. A logit fire occurrence model was generated from observed historic fires to provide required fire ignition input data. Wildfire likelihood and intensity were estimated by modeling 50,000 fires with the minimum travel time algorithm (MTT) at 30 m resolution under 97th percentile fire weather conditions. Post-fire tree mortality due to burning fire intensity at different successional stages ranged from 0.67% in the latest stages to 9.22% in the earliest. Stands showed a wide range of potential economic losses, and intermediate successional stage stands presented the highest values, with about 124 € ha− 1 on average. A fire risk map of the target areas was provided for forest management and risk mitigation purposes at the individual stand level. The approach proposed in this work has a wide potential for decision support, policy making and risk mitigation in southern European commercial conifer forests where large wildfires are the main natural hazard.