Modelling, Monitoring and Management of Forest Fires II

Book excerpt: As in the past, future forest fire scenarios are impacted by climatic trends and changes in climatic extremes, as well as by anthropic pressure. It is to be expected that future trends, especially in the Mediterranean regions, will certainly lead to an increasing impact of human pressure on the natural environment, due to increases in tourism and to the enlargement of urban residential areas invading the countryside. Forecasting the effects of both factors (climatic and anthropic) and separating their effects on forest fires frequencies may be particularly difficult, but is essential to improve our knowledge of forest fire occurrence probability and to better organize prevention and fighting activities. At the same time, estimation of the possible increase of fire risk over coming years is important, taking into account also the diverse fire prone environments present in the Mediterranean as well as many other areas (mountain slopes, coastal zones, large islands, etc). This book contains peer-reviewed papers presented at the Second International Conference on Modelling, Monitoring and Management of Forest Fires held in Kos, Greece, in 2010. The papers covered important topics in the field of prevention and fighting of forest fires, including: Computational Methods and Experiments; Air Quality and Health Risk Models; Detection, Monitoring and Response Systems; Decision Support Systems; Resource Optimization; Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Assessment.