
Crops are low-burning areas and, therefore, reintroducing them among forest masses in peri-urban areas is key both to keep fire away from people and to help in extinguishing tasks if a fire occurs.
These days, very shocking images have been circulating about the forest fires that California and, particularly, the city of Los Angeles are suffering. According to experts, the combination of a strong drought, high wind speed and the lack of open spaces in the forest, such as crops or meadows, have caused the fire to spread faster than the fire brigades can cope with. And this can also be transferred to Catalonia (or other areas of Spain) in many ways. According to preliminary data obtained within the framework of the Horizon Europe wildE project, to prevent fire from reaching urban areas of the metropolitan region of Barcelona, the most important point is to maintain open spaces around them, as if they were protection belts. “Crops and pastures are low-burning areas and, therefore, reintroducing them among forest masses in peri-urban areas is key both to keep fire away from people and to help in extinguishing tasks if a fire occurs. In addition, they can also improve the local economy and the associated biodiversity in open Mediterranean spaces,” explains Rodrigo Balaguer Romano, CREAF researcher and main author of this study.
Now, the big question is: where do we put these crops? According to the results of this research, “the best option for the Barcelona metropolitan region is to recover the crops that already existed in the 1950s and were abandoned and take advantage of the open spaces that the effects of droughts are already generating in the forests. In this way, we are already ahead of the forecasts of climate change scenarios and we reduce the risk in areas that will have a lot of accumulated fuel for fires (dry vegetation burns more),” adds the ecologist.
The best option for the Barcelona metropolis is to recover the abandoned crops that already existed in the 1950s and open new ones in those forest areas that are susceptible to severe droughts.
Less connected fire
The key factor analyzed by this study is the so-called “connectivity” of the fire. A fire razes more hectares if the landscape has more connectivity, that is, if the forest masses are more connected to each other and make it easier for the fire to jump from one place to another. For this reason, breaking the connectivity of the forest by adding open spaces such as crops is very necessary.
In this sense, CREAF experts have studied the uses given to the soils of the territory (whether it is urban land, forest or crops) and the connectivity of fire in case of fire now and until 2050 taking into account the expected increase in drought episodes. “The crop areas near the nuclei are those that best break the connectivity of fire and act as a belt that better protects the urban area. Thus, if a fire comes, it will burn more slowly,” says Balaguer-Romano. In the case of the metropolitan region of Barcelona, the data indicate that the recovery of 17,000 crops and pastures abandoned in recent years together with the transformation of forest areas prone to major drought episodes would allow a 30% reduction in fire connectivity in case of fires on average.
Mediterranean biodiversity
On the other hand, this strategy of restoring crops in an area where they were already present in the past and taking advantage of the effects of disturbances such as droughts, which will become more frequent, is not only beneficial for preventing fires, but also contributes to maintaining the richness of biodiversity associated with open spaces in Mediterranean areas. “We often think that “renaturalising” an ecosystem means re-introducing large herbivores from the past, but recovering the agroforestry mosaic in which disturbances such as fires, which will not stop occurring, have a less catastrophic dimension, can be essential for maintaining the ecological integrity of the landscape and its biodiversity,” explains Josep Maria Espelta, also a CREAF researcher, and coordinator together with Lluís Brotons of the wildE project. For example, a wide variety of mammals such as the badger, birds from agricultural environments such as the great bustard and pollinators such as butterflies and bees are animals favoured by the presence of crops and other open spaces.
This study is possible thanks to the data provided by the BCN Agraria program of the Technical Office for Municipal Prevention and Agrarian Development of the Barcelona Provincial Council, which has done exhaustive prior work to identify potentially recoverable agricultural areas, and its conclusions will soon be presented at the EGU 2025 congress in Vienna in a session on innovations in fire risk management in urban-forest interfaces.