Monitoring vulnerability of the Spanish forest landscapes: the SISPARES approach

Abstract SISPARES is a system devoted to study the ecological evolution of the Spanish Rural Landscapes including their characterisation, classification, and recent past and future changes. It is based on a sampling network of 215 permanent 4x4 km plots surveyed by using aerial photographs of three dates: 1956, 1984 and 1998. Currently, a new survey is going on. The network design was based on an environmental stratification of Spain well linked to the European Environmental Stratification. Forest Landscape Vulnerability (FLV) is defined as the risk of human disturbance, especially forest fires. We assessed FLV using an index based on Forest Landscape Fragility (FLF) weighted by Road Accessibility. FLF is defined as the risk of landscape disturbance caused by a high degree of interspersion and juxtaposition between patches of forest and non forest land uses: The non forest land uses, such urban, crop and managed grassland, are considered as potential sources of human disturbances, for the forest land use patches, including woodland, “matorral”, “dehesa”, tree plantation and riparian woodland. From 1956 till 1998, a significant increase of FLV has been observed in SISPARES landscape plots. This increase is related to the increment of forest fires in Spain during the last 40 years.