Analysis of the temporal behaviour of the number of forest fires in some countries of Europe

Abstract

This paper presents a temporal analysis of the number of forest fires that occurred in different European countries between 1990 and 2016. The countries studied were Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. In these countries, the data from the studied time interval indicated an annual average of 74000 forest fires where more than 75% occurred in countries of southern Europe, such as Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Croatia and Turkey. In addition, most of them occurred in Portugal (30%) and Spain (23%) which indicates that the fires occurred in the Iberian Peninsula exceeded 50 %. On the other hand, Portugal had the highest rate of number of fires per area and population with 0.24 annual fires per km2 and 2.04 annual fires per thousand inhabitants, whereas Germany has a rate of 0.0031 annual fires per km2 and 0.014 annual fires per thousand inhabitants. Clustering data of annual number of fires for the studied countries were fitted to a variable degree polynomial function. According to this fitting, the number of fires increased up to the year 2000 and decreased afterwards.