Temporal analysis of wildfire emissions in the Northwest of Spain using ESA CCI data

The Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula is one of the European regions with the highest frequency of forest fires. However, in the last decade fires in this region have burned larger areas and later in the fire season. Assessing the damage caused by fire and the pollutants released in the burning process is important to understand the effects on ecosystems and the carbon cycle, the recurrence of fires, and the effect on human health. In this work, we performed the estimation of emissions released in Galicia (Northwest Spain) in the last six years combining existing ESA CCI products. To quantify the area burned, we used the products from the Burned Area Algorithm developed within the Fire Climate Change Initiative (FireCCI) project. Then, the characterization and quantification of the total biomass were obtained from the Biomass CCI project at 100 m resolution by extracting the mean biomass by vegetation type from CORINE Land cover 2018. The burning efficiency factor was fitted using burn severity estimates from the dNBR calculation on the Sentinel-2 data. The emissions factors were selected from the literature. Our results show that during the last few years, there is a positive trend of annual emissions in Galicia. The sporadic maximums were registered in the years 2017 and 2022 when the climatic conditions aggravated the fire behaviour. In addition, Galicia is the region of Spain that registers the highest average estimates of emissions from fires since a high percentage of the affected area is occupied by pine and eucalyptus forests. These emissions contribute to a drastic decrease in air quality influencing the climate and affecting public health. Finally, we verified that adapting the burning efficiency factors to the specific conditions of the affected ecosystem generates more precise emission estimates.