| 1. |
- Fernandez-Anez, Nieves, et al.
(författare)
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Current Wildland Fire Patterns and Challenges in Europe : A Synthesis of National Perspectives
- 2021
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Ingår i: Air, Soil and Water Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 1178-6221. ; 14, s. 1-19
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Changes in climate, land use, and land management impact the occurrence and severity of wildland fires in many parts of the world. This is particularly evident in Europe, where ongoing changes in land use have strongly modified fire patterns over the last decades. Although satellite data by the European Forest Fire Information System provide large-scale wildland fire statistics across European countries, there is still a crucial need to collect and summarize in-depth local analysis and understanding of the wildland fire condition and associated challenges across Europe. This article aims to provide a general overview of the current wildland fire patterns and challenges as perceived by national representatives, supplemented by national fire statistics (2009–2018) across Europe. For each of the 31 countries included, we present a perspective authored by scientists or practitioners from each respective country, representing a wide range of disciplines and cultural backgrounds. The authors were selected from members of the COST Action “Fire and the Earth System: Science & Society” funded by the European Commission with the aim to share knowledge and improve communication about wildland fire. Where relevant, a brief overview of key studies, particular wildland fire challenges a country is facing, and an overview of notable recent fire events are also presented. Key perceived challenges included (1) the lack of consistent and detailed records for wildland fire events, within and across countries, (2) an increase in wildland fires that pose a risk to properties and human life due to high population densities and sprawl into forested regions, and (3) the view that, irrespective of changes in management, climate change is likely to increase the frequency and impact of wildland fires in the coming decades. Addressing challenge (1) will not only be valuable in advancing national and pan-European wildland fire management strategies, but also in evaluating perceptions (2) and (3) against more robust quantitative evidence.
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| 2. |
- Ferreira, Carla S.S., et al.
(författare)
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Impacts of land use and land cover changes on soil erosion
- 2023
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Ingår i: Remote Sensing of Soil and Land Surface Processes: Monitoring, Mapping, and Modeling. - : Elsevier BV. ; , s. 229-248
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Soil erosion is a major degradation process affecting many regions worldwide and impairing the ability of soil to provide ecosystem services. This chapter provides a brief overview of the soil erosion processes and their susceptibility in different land uses, including agricultural, forest, and urban land, as well as different soil management practices that have been implemented to mitigate the problem. Additionally, this chapter synthesizes information regarding the use of remote sensing to support soil erosion assessments, providing examples of remote sensing data used in different studies to support soil erosion modeling.
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| 3. |
- Ferreira, Carla Sofia Santos, et al.
(författare)
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Nature-Based Solutions for Flood Mitigation and Resilience in Urban Areas
- 2022
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Ingår i: Nature-Based Solutions for Flood Mitigation. - Cham : Springer. - 9783030775049 - 9783030775056 ; , s. 59-78, s. 59-78
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Urban areas face several environmental problems and risks related to water management, such as floods and degradation of water quality, enhancing population vulnerability and threatening urban sustainability. These problems are expected to be exacerbated with increasing urbanization and climate change, which leads to higher frequency and intensity of hydrometeorological extremes. Moving towards more flood resilient cities has proven a major challenge, particularly considering the high concentration of population and economic activities and, thus, high pressure on limited available space. Nature-based solutions (NBS) in urban areas favour stormwater retention, infiltration, and filtration, contributing to flood mitigation and enhancement of water quality. The effectiveness of different NBS on stormwater management, however, is influenced by design and placement aspects, but a network of connected NBS elements can improve flood mitigation and enhance urban resilience. Stronger evidence of the advantages of NBS, however, is still required to overcome the current challenges and barriers impairing their wider implementation in urban areas.
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| 4. |
- Ferreira, Carla S. S., et al.
(författare)
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Wetlands as nature-based solutions for water management in different environments
- 2023
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Ingår i: Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health. - : Elsevier BV. - 2468-5844. ; 33
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Wetlands are multifunctional systems performing as nature-based solutions (NBS) for water management. This paper provides an overview of natural and constructed wetlands and their potential to support the regulation of hydrological fluxes and water quality. Wetlands can modulate peak flows by storing runoff and slowly releasing it over time, with positive impacts on soil moisture. They can also change the overall water balance by influencing evapotranspiration, infiltration, and groundwater recharge. They can enhance resilience of a catchment to floods and torrents, especially with relative low return periods (<50 years), and safeguard water availability during droughts. Wetlands may remove or reduce a number of organic and inorganic pollutants (e.g., nutrients, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, pesticides) by different physical, chemical, and biological processes developed between vegetation, microorganisms, soil/growth substrate, and water. They have proven to be efficient and effective in improving the quality of water from different sources, such as runoff from agriculture and urban areas, and domestic and industrial wastewater. The overall performance of wetlands is determined by their characteristics (e.g., size, design, type of vegetation), within-catchment position, type and amount of water and pollutants, and local conditions (e.g., climate). A focus on wetlandscape, rather than individual wetlands, is required for optimal water management and maximization of other ecosystem services.
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| 5. |
- Kapović Solomun, Marijana, et al.
(författare)
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Flood legislation and land policy framework of EU and non-EU countries in Southern Europe
- 2022
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Ingår i: WIREs Water. - : Wiley. - 2049-1948. ; 9:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Floods are a widespread natural hazard affecting people and their assets in regions worldwide, including Southern Europe. Besides coastal floods, the Mediterranean region is highly prone to flash floods driven by short but intense precipitation events. With increasing flood risk due to climate change and socio-economic conditions, governments are under pressure to reinforce flood protection measures, which could be a great challenge for the weak economies of non-EU developing countries. This is of particular relevance to achieving international commitments such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Several policy frameworks have been developed to mitigate flooding risk, at European Union (EU) and global level. These frameworks call for a holistic risk reduction approach where governments, institutions, and households are all responsible for reducing risk. In practice, however, gray infrastructure remains the prevailing flood risk management measure in many countries. Incorporation into national legislation and implementation of the EU policy framework will increase constraints and pressures for non-EU countries, particularly those strongly committed to becoming EU members in future. This article provides a comprehensive review of policies and measures implemented in four different southern European countries to mitigate flood hazard, and compares governance aspects between EU (Portugal and Slovenia) and non-EU countries (B&H and Serbia). Understanding governance aspects and the status of flood-related policy implementation is of critical importance in protecting people and enhancing resilience to climate change impacts. Programs of improvement measures and further integration of sustainable water management with other sectoral policies are required to reduce flood risks.
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| 6. |
- Rahmati, Omid, et al.
(författare)
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Contribution of physical and anthropogenic factors to gully erosion initiation
- 2022
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Ingår i: Catena (Cremlingen. Print). - : Elsevier BV. - 0341-8162 .- 1872-6887. ; 210, s. 105925-105925
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Losses of large volumes of soil through gully formation lead to serious environmental, societal, and economic problems for human societies. This study establishes a framework based on an artificial intelligence approach to investigate the impact of geo-environmental and topo-hydrological factors on gully occurrences in the Biram region, Iran. The maximum entropy, random forest, and boosted regression trees machine-learning models were applied. The relative importance of variables (RIV) was then determined and gully erosion susceptibility maps were generated. Model results were evaluated using cutoff–dependent and –independent metrics. All models identified road construction as the main cause of gully formation in the study region (RVI ranged between 27% and 34%), and a medium contribution of distance from stream (RVI = 15–18%), lithology (RVI = 12–15%) and land use (RVI = 8–12%). Other factors such as drainage density, topographic wetness index, aspect, slope, profile curvature, elevation and plan curvature showed lower relative importance (RIV < 10%). Planners should pay attention to minimizing gully erosion along roads, so that river systems and downstream communities are adequately protected.
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| 7. |
- Raška, Pavel, et al.
(författare)
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Identifying barriers for nature-based solutions in flood risk management : An interdisciplinary overview using expert community approach
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Management. - : Elsevier BV. - 0301-4797 .- 1095-8630. ; 310
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The major event that hit Europe in summer 2021 reminds society that floods are recurrent and among the costliest and deadliest natural hazards. The long-term flood risk management (FRM) efforts preferring sole technical measures to prevent and mitigate floods have shown to be not sufficiently effective and sensitive to the environment. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) mark a recent paradigm shift of FRM towards solutions that use nature-derived features, processes and management options to improve water retention and mitigate floods. Yet, the empirical evidence on the effects of NBS across various settings remains fragmented and their implementation faces a series of institutional barriers. In this paper, we adopt a community expert perspective drawing upon LAND4FLOOD Natural flood retention on private land network (https://www.land4flood.eu) in order to identify a set of barriers and their cascading and compound interactions relevant to individual NBS. The experts identified a comprehensive set of 17 barriers affecting the implementation of 12 groups of NBS in both urban and rural settings in five European regional environmental domains (i.e., Boreal, Atlantic, Continental, Alpine-Carpathian, and Mediterranean). Based on the results, we define avenues for further research, connecting hydrology and soil science, on the one hand, and land use planning, social geography and economics, on the other. Our suggestions ultimately call for a transdisciplinary turn in the research of NBS in FRM.
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