What is worse: 1,000 wildfires of one hectare each, or one wildfire of 1,000 hectares?

That was the question posed by Carolina Rodríguez, Dean of the Balearic Islands COEF, during an interview with local news outlet IB3.

At first glance, the answer may seem obvious: one thousand fires sounds worse than one.

Ecologically, however, the answer is more complicated.

Not all fire is the same

When fires are small, spatially dispersed, and relatively low in severity, they can create a mosaic of different habitats across the landscape.

These openings can:

• provide feeding areas for wildlife
• promote plant regeneration
• increase habitat heterogeneity
• create different vegetation structures and successional stages
• break the continuity of fuels

In many Mediterranean ecosystems, vegetation is adapted to recover from fire, particularly when fire severity is not extreme and seed sources remain nearby.

A landscape shaped by many small disturbances can therefore look very different from one affected by a single large, high-severity wildfire.

One large fire is a different story

A single 1,000-hectare wildfire can have consequences that extend far beyond the area burned.

Large, severe wildfires can:

• drive widespread tree mortality and destroy seed sources
• degrade soils and dramatically increase erosion risk
• hinder natural regeneration
• alter hydrological processes
• push ecosystems towards alternative states from which recovery may be slow or uncertain

And the consequences extend far beyond the forest.

Large wildfires can:

• threaten firefighters and communities
• damage homes and critical infrastructure
• disrupt agricultural and livestock systems
• generate prolonged smoke exposure
• affect water quality and aquatic ecosystems downstream

The goal is not to eliminate fire

Fire is an integral ecological process in many Mediterranean ecosystems.

The goal should not be to eliminate fire, but to avoid the conditions that allow fire to become exceptionally large, severe, and difficult to control.

This means shifting attention from individual fires to the landscape itself.

By reducing fuel continuity and restoring landscape heterogeneity, we can create landscapes that are more resilient to wildfire and less likely to support the rapid spread of large, high-severity fires.

Prevention is also a landscape problem

The cost of proactive landscape management needs to be weighed against the enormous costs associated with wildfire suppression, infrastructure damage, agricultural losses, loss of ecosystem services, and impacts on human health and wellbeing.

The question, therefore, is not simply how many fires occur.

It is also:

What kind of landscapes are we creating, and what kind of fires can those landscapes sustain?

A big thank you to Carolina Rodríguez for sharing her expertise and helping drive this crucial conversation about wildfire in the Balearic Islands.

Watch the interview

Carolina Rodríguez discusses wildfire management and forest fires in the Balearic Islands in this interview with IB3:

Watch the interview on YouTube