Integrated Future Wildfire Hot Spot Mapping for Austria_Preparation of climate data

The Austria Fire Futures (AFF) project focuses on forest ecosystems in mountainous regions and integrates new insights into the fire behavior of vegetation into existing forest fire models as well as the role of recreational activities for ignition risk. The main goal of the project is to develop an innovative approach to hotspot maps at high spatial resolution to describe wildfire initiation and spread risk under different climate scenarios. The study will improve our understanding of fire-prone forest areas that may change over time and space, taking into account underlying climate change and existing fuel levels. These new hotspot maps will allow experts, practitioners and the interested public to look into the future to derive sound short-, medium- and long-term recommendations for preventive and sustainable forest management and emergency planning. The Austria Fire Futures project therefore has three main objectives: (i) The development of new future-oriented hotspot maps for Austria - based on integrated forest fire risk modeling taking into account climate change and new fuel quantity data. (ii) The assessment and integration of the main impacts of recreational activities on the risk of fire occurrence based on a case study in Lower Austria/Raxgebirge. (iii) The improvement of information on the publicly available platforms "www.waldbrand.at" and "fire.boku.ac.at" by implementing the project results.