• Energy Research

We bring a practical and comprehensive GIS-based framework to utilize freely available remotely sensed datasets to assess wildfire ignition probability and spreading capacities of vegetated landscapes. The study area consists of the country-level scale of the Romanian territory, characterized by a diversity of vegetated landscapes threatened by climate change. We utilize the Wildfire Ignition Probability/Wildfire Spreading Capacity Index (WIPI/WSCI). WIPI/WSCI models rely on a multi-criteria data mining procedure assessing the study area’s social, environmental, geophysical, and fuel properties based on open access remotely sensed data. We utilized the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis to weigh each indexing criterion’s impact factor and assess the model’s overall sensitivity. Introducing ROC analysis at an earlier stage of the workflow elevated the final Area Under the Curve (AUC) of WIPI from 0.705 to 0.778 and WSCI from 0.586 to 0.802. The modeling results enable discussion on the vulnerability of protected areas and the exposure of man-made structures to wildfire risk. Our study shows that within the wildland–urban interface of Bucharest’s metropolitan area, there is a remarkable building stock of healthcare, residential and educational functions, which are significantly exposed and vulnerable to wildfire spreading risk.

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.

The data shared in this package delivers the wildfire ignition probability and spreading capacity of vegetated surfaces in Romania following the method developed by Hysa and Baskaya (2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-018-0519-9). The model relies on remotely sensed free data that covers the time-lapse between 2015-2020. Geospatial information about sixteen criteria about anthropogenic, hydro-meteorological, geophysical, and fuel properties of Romanian territory are considered here. Raw data regarding each criterion is acquired for free from different online databases. The attribute table of the shared shapefile includes all inventory measurements per each criterion. It consist of 70410 point geometries in total representing 1km2 each, covering all vegetated surfaces of Romania. This data consist of a geospatial points layer (shp file), which deliver both the multi-criteria inventory records and the calculated wildfire ignition probability and wildfire spreading capacity (WIPI/WSCI) of the Romanian vegetated surfaces. The distance between points is 1km. The file consists of 70410 points in total, that overlap with the vegetated surfaces as derived from CORINE Land Cover data of 2018.