Questions: Land use legacies in current forest understorey vegetation, thoroughly studied in temperate regions, were investigated in a Mediterranean context. We tested the effect of three historical variables on current forest plant communities and traits: forest temporal continuity (ancient: forested before 1860, recent: reforested after 1860, and...
In August 2016, a fire due to negligence during leisure activities started in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) of Rognac (a community located to the NE of Marseilles, SE France) and, driven by a strong wind and by exceptionally dry and warm climatic conditions, burned almost 3000 ha, mostly in urbanized area, in a few hours (rate of spread up to ...
1. Significant pine mortality has been observed in mountainous areas with a Mediterranean climate over recent decades, impacting ecosystem function and economic management of these forests. Despite this, few studies have examined how forest management can interact with disturbances to influence pine mortality.2. We used process-based models to quan...
The increasing concern regarding fire in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) around the world highlights the need to better understand the flammability of WUI fuels. Research on plant flammability is rapidly increasing but commonly only considers a single fuel scale. In some cases, however, different fuel scales (e.g. leaf and litter bed) have great...
A new fire policy reinforcing aggressive fire suppression was established in Mediterranean France in response to the devastating wildfires of the 1990s, but to what extent this has changed fire activity yet remains poorly understood. For this purpose, we compared the number and location of ignitions and of burned areas between two 20-year periods (...
Human activities have altered fire regimes for millennia by suppressing or enhancing natural fire activity. However, whether these anthropogenic pressures on fire activity have exceeded and will surpass climate forcing still remains uncertain. We tested if, how and the extent to which seasonal fire activity in southern France has recently (1976-200...
This study describes how physiological process-based models can be used to assess the mortalityrisk of forest trees under global change. Using the CASTANEA model, we simulated the developmentover time of tree functioning with different ontogenetic and phenotypic characteristics (age, diameter,Leaf Area Index, leaf traits) and growing in different s...
A good knowledge of the spatiotemporal patterns of the causes of wildfire ignition is crucial to an efficient fire policy. However, little is known about the situation in southeastern France because the fire database contains unreliable data. We used data for cases with well-established causes from 1973 to 2013 to determine the location of spatial ...
