We are pleased to share that a new manuscript, “Fire resilience in a Mediterranean cultural landscape,” is now available as a preprint through Research Square.
The manuscript examines how historical agricultural terraces and other landscape and stand characteristics influence forest resistance, recovery, and post-fire regeneration following wildfire in a Mediterranean cultural landscape.
Traditional agricultural terraces are widespread across Mediterranean landscapes. Although many terraces are no longer actively cultivated, these historical landscape structures remain embedded in forests that have developed through decades of land-use change and fire.
But do these cultural landscape legacies influence how forests respond to wildfire?
The study examines this question eleven years after a mixed-severity wildfire in Mallorca, Spain.
We surveyed 29 forest plots, including 15 terraced and 14 non-terraced plots, with different fire histories.
For burned plots, we evaluated different dimensions of resilience, including resistance, recovery, and post-fire establishment of Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis).
Forest resilience is not a single process. A forest can retain much of its pre-fire structure but subsequently recover slowly, while another forest may experience substantial structural change but move toward a different stable condition.
To capture these different trajectories, I combined resistance, recovery, and post-fire establishment within a resilience framework.
I identified five post-fire pathways:
The results suggest that the influence of historical terraces on fire resilience is more complex than might be expected.
Overstory resistance did not differ significantly between terraced and non-terraced hillslopes. However, terraced stands consistently retained a greater proportion of their pre-fire tree density, basal area, and small-diameter trees.
Instead, resistance was more strongly associated with factors such as elevation, aspect, and tree size.
Burned non-terraced stands showed greater multivariate convergence toward their unburned reference conditions than burned terraced stands, driven mainly by changes in overstory structure and recruitment.
Post-fire establishment varied substantially among burned plots. Some showed relatively little recruitment, while others developed extremely dense Pinus halepensis recruitment, exceeding 4,000 saplings per hectare.
Nearly half of the burned plots showed evidence of a trajectory toward pre-fire conditions. However, the transition-risk pathway was the most common, occurring in 39.1% of burned plots.
This pathway is particularly important because it may indicate a risk of vegetation-type conversion from Aleppo pine forest toward persistent shrubland.
Identifying these trajectories early could therefore help managers determine where closer monitoring or targeted intervention may be needed.
The study highlights the importance of considering historical land-use legacies, forest structure, and post-fire trajectories together when assessing wildfire resilience.
The findings also show that cultural landscape features such as agricultural terraces do not necessarily have a straightforward effect on post-fire resilience. Their influence needs to be considered alongside the environmental and structural characteristics of the forests in which they occur.
More broadly, understanding why some forests recover after wildfire while others move toward alternative vegetation states is increasingly important as Mediterranean ecosystems face more frequent drought and increasingly challenging fire conditions.
The resilience framework presented here provides a potential approach for identifying early signs of declining recovery and emerging vegetation change, although its generality and predictive value will need to be tested across additional fires, landscapes, and longer post-fire periods.
The manuscript is currently undergoing peer review, and the submitted version is publicly available through Research Square:
Keywords: Aleppo pine, Balearic Islands, dry-stone walls, forest structure, recruitment, regeneration, time since fire
Read the preprint on Research Square
Note: This manuscript is currently under peer review and has not yet been accepted for publication.