Award to a doctoral thesis on fire and forest management

According to the study, forestry management prevents the fire severity from being high and this effectiveness can last up to ten years after the preventive actions take place. Another conclusion states that forestry management should take place avoiding heavy machinery, mostly in hills, in order not to affect physical, chemical and microbiological properties of soil and its erosion. Another important note in the study states that when the fire severity is high, the best option is to carry out a mid and long-term forestry management (between ten and twenty years after a fire in an ecosystem like the Mediterranean), trying not to intervene when the soil is still fragile, but not letting time go by and accumulate a great amount of vegetation. “In those areas like the ones analysed in the study, where the Aleppo pine, there is a great amount of trees, which have water stress problems; if trees and branches are removed and left on the ground, taking all these vegetation after twenty years can be very expensive”, says Francos.

Under the title “Wildfire and forest management effects on soil properties”, the awarded thesis was supervised by Xavier Úberda and Paulo Alexandre da Silva Pereira, and is framed within the project “Strategies on forest and post-wildfire management for conservation and improvement of soil quality”, funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. This thesis analyses the physical, chemical and microbiological parameters of soil in the areas of Baix Empordà, Anoia and Bages. At the moment, Francos is doing research to set the inflection point in which a fire goes from low to medium severity, and from medium to high. To do so, he considers data such as soik properties and variables such as the uses of soil before a fire, post-fire meteorological conditions or the amount of time the fire has been burning soil.