Search

Post-wildfire management actions mainly targeting the removal of salvage logs and burned trees is a common but controversial practice. Although it aims to regain some of the natural and economic value of a forest, it also requires disturbing burned areas, which may have some negative consequences affecting, for instance, the carbon cycle, soil erosion, and vegetation cover. Observations from different geographic settings contribute to this scientific debate, and yet, the spatiotemporal evolution of the post-fire road network developed as part of fire management practices and its influence on vegetation recovery has been rarely examined. Specifically, we still lack observations from Türkiye, though wildfires are a common event. This research examined the evolution of the vegetation cover in relation to post-fire road constructions and the resultant debris materials in areas affected by the 2017 Sapadere fire in Antalya, Türkiye. We used multi-sensor, multi-temporal optical satellite data and monitored the variation in both vegetation cover and road network from the pre-to post-fire periods between 2014 and 2021. Our results showed that fire management practices almost doubled the road network in the post-fire period, from 487 km to 900 km. Overall, 7% of the burned area was affected by these practices. As a result, vegetation cover in those areas shows only ∼50% recovery, whereas undisturbed areas exhibit ∼100% recovery 5 years after the event. Notably, such spatiotemporal analysis carried out for different burned areas would provide a better insight into the most suitable post-fire management practices. Our findings, in particular, show that the current practices need to be revisited as they cause a delay in vegetation recovery.

The Svalbard Archipelago represents the northernmost place on Earth where cryospheric hazards, such as thaw slumps (TSs) and thermo-erosion gullies (TEGs) could take place and rapidly develop under the influence of climatic variations. Svalbard permafrost is specifically sensitive to rapidly occurring warming, and therefore, a deeper understanding of TSs and TEGs is necessary to understand and foresee the dynamics behind local cryospheric hazards' occurrences and their global implications. We present the latest update of two polygonal inventories where the extent of TSs and TEGs is recorded across Nordenskiöld Land (Svalbard Archipelago), over a surface of approximately 4000 km2. This area was chosen because it represents the most concentrated ice-free area of the Svalbard Archipelago and, at the same time, where most of the current human settlements are concentrated. The inventories were created through the visual interpretation of high-resolution aerial photographs as part of our ongoing effort toward creating a pan-Arctic repository of TSs and TEGs. Overall, we mapped 562 TSs and 908 TEGs, from which we separately generated two susceptibility maps using a generalised additive model (GAM) approach, under the assumption that TSs and TEGs manifest across Nordenskiöld Land, according to a Bernoulli probability distribution. Once the modelling results were validated, the two susceptibility patterns were combined into the first multi-hazard cryospheric susceptibility map of the area. The two inventories are available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.945348 (Nicu et al., 2022a) and https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.945395 (Nicu et al., 2022b).

Earthquakes do not only trigger landslides in co-seismic phases but also elevate post-seismic landslide susceptibility either by causing a strength reduction in hillslope materials or by producing co-seismic landslide deposits, which are prone to further remobilization under the external forces generated by subsequent rainfall events. However, we still have limited observations regarding the post-seismic landslide processes. And, the examined cases are rarely representative of tropical conditions where the precipitation regime is strong and persistent. Therefore, in this study, we introduce three new sets of multi-temporal landslide inventories associated with subsets of the areas affected by 1) 2016 Reuleuet (Indonesia, Mw = 6.5), 2) 2018 Porgera (Papua New Guinea, Mw = 7.5) and 3) 2012 Sulawesi (Indonesia, Mw = 6.3), 2017 Kasiguncu (Indonesia, Mw = 6.6) and 2018 Palu (Indonesia, Mw = 7.5) earthquakes. Overall, our findings show that the landslide susceptibility level associated with the occurrences of new landslides return to pre-seismic conditions in less than a year in the study areas under consideration. We stress that these observations might not be representative of the entire area affected by these earthquakes but the areal boundaries of our study areas.