Land Abandonment and Wildfire Risk

Rural land abandonment occurs when cultivation, grazing, mowing, or biomass collection ceases or sharply declines on previously managed land. It can increase wildfire hazard by allowing combustible vegetation and dead organic matter to accumulate, creating a more continuous fuel complex across the landscape.

From abandonment to fuel accumulation

Traditional land use repeatedly removes or fragments vegetation. After abandonment, ecological succession often replaces cropped or grazed patches with grasses, shrubs, and young trees, while litter and woody debris accumulate where biomass production exceeds decomposition or removal.

• Ungrazed grasses and herbs add abundant fine fuels, which dry quickly and ignite readily.
• Shrubs, saplings, fallen branches, and leaf litter increase the total fuel load.
• The effect varies by ecosystem, climate, decomposition rate, and the intensity of earlier land management.

How accumulated fuel changes fire behaviour

Hazard rises not only because there is more fuel, but because vegetation becomes connected horizontally and vertically. This continuity gives fire pathways across the ground and from surface vegetation towards tree crowns.

• Horizontal continuity enables flames to spread across formerly cultivated or grazed breaks.
• Shrubs and young trees can become ladder fuels, carrying surface fire into the canopy.
• Greater fuel loads can produce higher fire intensity, longer burning, and more difficult suppression when fuels are sufficiently dry.
• Drought, heat, low humidity, and wind determine whether accumulated biomass becomes available fuel and how rapidly fire spreads.

Risk qualification and management

Abandonment primarily increases the fuel component of wildfire hazard; ignition sources, weather, topography, exposure, and response capacity still shape overall risk. It may initially reduce some human ignitions, so increased fire occurrence is not automatic.

• Targeted grazing, mowing, mechanical removal, and carefully controlled prescribed burning can reduce fuel loads.
• Fuel breaks and maintenance of low-fuel agricultural mosaics can interrupt landscape-scale continuity.
• Management should retain ecological values and avoid excessive fuel removal that may damage soils or habitats.

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