Biology subjects

Domenech, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Domenech, R..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Record-breaking wildfire intensity and nocturnal spread during the extreme 2025 wildfire season in Southwestern Europe: causes and impacts

Southwestern Europe faced an extreme wildfire season in 2025, with nearly 700,000 hectares burned in the Iberian Peninsula (IP) alone. Here, we analyze the drivers and impacts of the 2025 wildfire season in the IP and its significance within the ongoing global pyrocrisis. Decades-long declines in burned area, driven by increased fire suppression, ceased after an inflection point in 2022. Fire intensity has escalated over the last two decades, and the energy emitted in 2025 approached that produced annually by a 1,000MW nuclear reactor. Despite a historically wet spring, an extreme summer heatwave triggered a flash drought, dehydrating fuels below critical thresholds. Remarkably, 29-42% of all wildfires spread faster at night than during the day, a seldom-reported phenomenon likely arising from interactions between surface weather, atmospheric instability, and pyroconvective processes. Global change-induced increases in fire intensity facilitated the overwhelming of suppression efforts during simultaneous fire events that may have been manageable decades ago. Fire activity expanded into previously fire-free high-altitude regions, and there was a marked change in fire-size distributions, with the largest wildfire in record and the largest proportion of burned area by megafires (those burning over 5,000ha). Impacts included over 2,000 premature deaths from smoke exposure and significant effects on protected areas. These results indicate shifts in key components of anthropogenic fire regimes, including unprecedented nocturnal fire acceleration and increased burned area and fire intensity, with escalating impacts on human health and ecosystems.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Protected areas show substantial and increasing risk of wildfire globally

Protected area coverage is set to expand in response to climate change and the biodiversity crisis, but we lack assessments of wildfire incidence in protected areas. Here we quantify bigeographical variation in global patterns of burned area in protected areas. During the twenty-first century, wildfires have burned 2 billion hectares of protected areas - an area the size of Russia and India combined - and, while protected areas only cover 19.2% of semi-natural ecosystems, they concentrate 28.5% of the area burned annually. Wildfire in protected areas increased significantly between 2001-2024 (+0.46% yr-1), even after taking into account increases in protected area (+0.27% yr-1), pointing to a disproportional impact of fire on protected areas under increasingly severe fire weather. This pattern showed marked variation across biomes, with the largest disproportionate increases occurring in fire-prone biomes (e.g. Mediterranean and dry tropical forests, tropical grasslands and xeric shrublands). There were important exceptions to this general trend, and protected area fire was lower than expected in biomes where fire activity is naturally limited by moisture (e.g. tropical rainforests or montane grasslands). Wildfires are important for the health of many ecosystems, and such values of burned area will not always mean a negative outcome. Amidst concerted efforts to expand protected area coverage such as the Global Biodiversity Framework, our results highlight the need for new management strategies that address the globally increasing impacts of burned area across protected areas under unabated climate change.

ecology↗