Forest fire is regarded as one of the most significant factors leading to land degradation. While evaluating fire hazard or producing fire risk zone maps, quantitative analyses using historic fire data is often required, and during all these modeling and multi-criteria analysis processes, the fire event itself is taken as the dependent variable. However, there are two main problematic issues in analyzing historic fire data.

Fire regimes depend on climate, vegetation structure and human influences. Climate determines the water content in fuel and, in the longer term, the amount of biomass. Humans alter fire regimes through increased ignition frequency and by hindering the spread of fire through fire suppression and fuel fragmentation. Here, we present FIRE LADY (FIre REgime and LAndscape DYnamics), a spatially explicit fire regime model that takes into account daily weather data, topography, vegetation growth, fire behaviour, fire suppression and land use changes.

The Socio Bosque program is a national conservation agreement scheme of the government of Ecuador. Socio Bosque consists of the transfer of a direct monetary incentive per hectare of native forest and other native ecosystems to individual landowners and local and indigenous communities who protect these ecosystems, through voluntary conservation agreements that are monitored on a regular basis for compliance. Two years after its creation, the program now includes more than half a million hectares of natural ecosystems and has over 60,000 beneficiaries.