Wildfire simulators for prevention management

Forest fires are natural processes which without human intervention would be started by lightning, linked to thunderstorms and seasonal climate typical to the Mediterranean systems, generating discontinuities in the forest stands. These fires have been happening over thousands of years, living with the human being and the rest of the nature, making a model of what we nowadays know as Mediterranean landscape, and propitiating the formations and biodiversity we currently know, adapted and with great capacity of answer facing disturbances. Integrated in the natural ecosystem, humans have relied on natural resources and have been modifying them according to their necessities. As the human population increased, extraction of resources continued while nature produced more resources for their use and enjoyment in an almost unlimited way. Agriculture, stockbreeding, fire and wood consumption constitute traditional exploitations, which have been able to change the disturbances system in many of our landscapes. The abandoning of the historical usage, such as cultivation or traditional mountain resource management, have brought about the consolidation of the great continuous woods and forests with important fuel loads of available combustible; which combined with adverse weather conditions, provoke uncontainable kind of fires for the common extinguishing systems. All of this justifies that, currently, the large forest fires (from now on will be referred to as LWF) are the main forest stand agents. Even though, in current society they do not have a good reputation as they are usually related to natural disasters which entail destruction and, sometimes, human victims. We could say that the forest fires have happened in the past and will occur in the future. It is not neither reasonable nor possible to eliminate forest fires from the Mediterranean ecosystem. The partial or temporary removal of these fires can create more destructive fires. Although from the ecological point of view there exist fire systems which are natural and totally sustainable, the large quantity of housing constructed in our mountains make some of them unsustainable from a socioeconomically standpoint. This creates many conflicts in the management of the territory. Fire ecology, the branch of science that studies the fires’ function in the organisms and ecosystems, provides the scientific basis to improve the territory’s management in surroundings where fires have a principal role. In order to carry out a sustainable management of the resources, it is necessary to have a solid base in the implied processes and to have the basic knowledge to be able to manage our forests with success. The greatest success in the management of these Mediterranean systems associated to fire is the coexistence of the most sustainable way with the forest fires; encouraging a management focused on rising a better response time from the forest to atmospheric disturbances not just the modification of its fuel and taking into account the ecological and social processes.