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Gimeno, F., Galleguillos, M., Manuschevich, D., & Zambrano-Bigiarini, M. (2022). A coupled modeling approach to assess the effect of forest policies in water provision: A biophysical evaluation of a drought-prone rural catchment in south-central Chile. Sci. Total Environ., 830, 154608.
Abstract: The effect of different forest conservation policies on water provision has been poorly investigated due to a lack of an integrative methodological framework that enables its quantification. We developed a method for assessing the effects of forest conservation policies on water provision for rural inhabitants, based on a land-use model coupled with an ecohydrological model. We used as a case study the Lumaco catchment, Chile, a territory dominated by native forests (NF) and non-native tree farms, with an extended dry period where nearly 12,600 people of rural communities get drinking water through water trucks. We analyzed three land-use policy scenarios: i) a baseline scenario based on historical land-cover maps; ii) a NF Recovery and Protection (NFRP) scenario, based on an earlier implementation of the first NF Recovery and Forestry Development bill; and iii) a Pristine (PR) scenario, based on potential vegetation belts; the latter two based on Dyna CLUE, and simulated between 1990 and 2015. Impacts on water provision from each scenario were computed with SWAT. The NFRP scenario resulted in an increase of 6974 ha of NF regarding the baseline situation, and the PR scenario showed an increase of 26,939 ha of NF. Despite large differences in NF areas, slight increases in inflows (Q) were found between the NFRP and the PR scenarios, with relative differences with respect to the baseline of 0.3% and 2.5% for NFRP and PR, respectively. Notwithstanding, these small differences in the NFRP scenario, they become larger if we analyze the cumulative values during the dry season only (December, January, and February), where they reach 1.1% in a normal year and 3.1% in a dry year. Flows increases were transformed into water truck costs resulting in up to 441,876 USD (monthly) of fiscal spending that could be avoided during a dry period.
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Miranda, A., Mentler, R., Moletto-Lobos, I., Alfaro, G., Aliaga, L., Balbontin, D., et al. (2022). The Landscape Fire Scars Database: mapping historical burned area and fire severity in Chile. Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14(8), 3599–3613.
Abstract: Achieving a local understanding of fire regimes requires high-resolution, systematic and dynamic databases. High-quality information can help to transform evidence into decision-making in the context of rapidly changing landscapes, particularly considering that geographical and temporal patterns of fire regimes and their trends vary locally over time. Global fire scar products at low spatial resolutions are available, but high-resolution wildfire data, especially for developing countries, are still lacking. Taking advantage of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) big-data analysis platform, we developed a flexible workflow to reconstruct individual burned areas and derive fire severity estimates for all reported fires. We tested our approach for historical wild-fires in Chile. The result is the Landscape Fire Scars Database, a detailed and dynamic database that reconstructs 8153 fires scars, representing 66.6% of the country's officially recorded fires between 1985 and 2018. For each fire event, the database contains the following information: (i) the Landsat mosaic of pre- and post-fire images; (ii) the fire scar in binary format; (iii) the remotely sensed estimated fire indexes (the normalized burned ratio, NBR, and the relative delta normalized burn ratio, RdNBR); and two vector files indicating (iv) the fire scar perimeter and (v) the fire scar severity reclassification, respectively. The Landscape Fire Scars Database for Chile and GEE script (JavaScript) are publicly available. The framework developed for the database can be applied anywhere in the world, with the only requirement being its adaptation to local factors such as data availability, fire regimes, land cover or land cover dynamics, vegetation recovery, and cloud cover. The Landscape Fire Scars Database for Chile is publicly available in https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.941127 (Miranda et al., 2022).
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