Manual for describing land degradation indicators

Table of Contents

1. Editor
2. Introduction
3. Classification of indicators
4. Land degradation indicators
5. Evaluation and short-list of indicators
6. Explanations for filling the information sheets
   1. General information
   2. Climate indicators
   3. Water indicators
   4. Soil indicators
   5. Vegetation indicators
   6. Water runoff indicators
   7. Forest fires indicators
   8. Agricultural indicators
   9. Cultivation indicators
   10. Husbandry indicators
   11. Land management indicators
   12. Land use indicators
   13. Water use indicators
   14. Tourism indicators
   15. Social indicators
   16. Institutional indicators
7. Farm survey research
8. Focus group approach
9. References

Forest fires indicators

Fire frequency: It is defined as the frequency or return time in which a fire occurs. This indicator requires information on both the historic and current fire frequency. While current fire frequency data is not difficult to collect for large areas, it is not easy to determine the historic fire frequency on a restricted forest covered area. The limits of the indicator include the difficulty in finding statistical fire data and homogeneous data on burned surfaces for different European countries, at a municipality level. The following classes can be distinguished: (a) ecosystem burned every 100 and 50 years on average will be considered unchanged or barely altered; (c) ecosystem burned every 25-50 years on average will be considered to be moderately altered; (c) ecosystem burned every 15-25 years on average will be considered highly altered; (e) ecosystem burned every <15 years on average will be considered extremely altered and very prone to desertification processes which start with changes in cover, structure and biodiversity.

Fire risk: Fire risk is determined by the particular composition of vegetation and therefore both by its flammability and combustion capacity and its capacity to recover after fire. Therefore, fire risk is estimated on the basis of the structure and the dominant vegetation species present in each study site. The following categories of fire risk have been defined: (a) low, perennial crops, annual crops such as maize, tobacco, sunflower, etc.; (b) moderate, annual crops such as cereals or meadows, deciduous oaks, mixed deciduous and evergreen oaks, mixed Mediterranean maquis and evergreen forests; (c) high, Mediterranean maquis; (d) very high, coniferous forests.

Burned area: It is defined as the average area burned per decade on a defined territorial surface. It is defined per decade using the annual data of forested and non-forested areas burned by wildfire, at municipality level at least. The following classes can be defined: (a) low, <10 ha of total burned surface per decade on 10 km² of territorial surface; (b) moderate, 10 - 25 ha of total burned surface per decade on 10 km² of territorial surface; (c) high, 26 -50 ha of total burned surface per decade on 10 km² of territorial surface; (d) very high, >50 ha of total burned surface per decade on 10 km² of territorial surface.