REFLORESTA - Technological and social innovation to improve prevention and accelerate recovery of fire-affected ecosystems and landscapes

Climate change is directly related to the increased vulnerability to and severity of fires, although changes in land use due to rural depopulation, new economic trends, agricultural regulation, etc... aggravate the vulnerability of a Cross-Border Area that is eminently forest-based.

Both PREVENTION of fires and RECOVERY after fires are key measures to improve resilience, and REFLORESTA focuses on both challenges with innovative approaches:

It addresses prevention by employing for the 1st time Artificial Intelligence techniques so that new meteorological, environmental and territorial variables can be managed in the detection of vulnerabilities and points of special risk as well as the memory of all recorded fires, based on historical series of data from the last 40 years. The results, it is hoped, will be innovative and more accurate than those currently available, and will be able to incorporate weather forecasts so that operations such as INFOCA, INFOCAL or Civil Protection can anticipate and even carry out preventive actions.

In terms of recovery, the objective is to create more resilient landscapes in the face of CC and future fires, and to this end the approach is also innovative, applying techniques such as hydraulic modelling to minimise the dragging of ash into rivers and soil erosion, or the combination of remote and close remote sensing (satellite/drone) for high-precision emergency diagnoses that allow new scientific-technical approaches to be applied in the design of Action Plans, or the drafting of these from ecosystemic approaches to ensure the intelligent restoration of the affected landscapes and ecosystems.

In the design of REFLORESTA, the cross-border approach and cooperation is fundamental, both to take advantage of capacities that are distributed in different entities of both States, and because each one provides pilot areas in different Ecosystems, representative of the POCTEP Territory, which will allow testing the techniques, approaches and tools of Governance, Planning and Management and to obtain useful lessons from this contrast.

The expected result: better governance, improved prevention capacities, smart ecosystem restoration, to do more with less through a better understanding of ecosystems, and increased resilience of ecosystems and landscapes.