Determinantes geográficos da localização do perímetro das áreas queimadas

Mestrado em Engenharia Florestal e dos Recursos Naturais - Instituto Superior de Agronomia Fire is a natural process and a component of many ecosystems; it is an important factor to ensure the biodiversity in these areas. However, fire is damage for the forests, in recent decades it has increased in the Mediterranean countries due to rural depopulation and climatic conditions. Particularly, Portugal shows a great increase of surface burnt in the first years of this century in relation to the end of twentieth century. Portugal is a country with high forest cover and importance derived from forestry, so that is required every effort to maintain the future of their forests. The analysis of boundaries of the burned areas allows study the correlation between the spatial distribution of fire and land environmental variables, and particularly explain why some areas are maintained in many cases as border fire. This will be the main objective of this study, based on the exploration of the most significant variables to interpret the location of such boundaries in mainland Portugal. By performing statistical analysis of a set of data for large fires in Portugal from 1996 to 2005, has proved the correlation between land use and the boundaries of the fire. The statistical method used is the classification trees, used to obtain accurate prediction models. The analysis results show that most of the boundaries of fires take place in areas of undergrowth