In this article we describe contrasting state land use and fire management policy forest landscape level legacies in two contiguous municipalities of the Gredos mountain range in Central Spain. We employed an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach to collect complementary palynological, dendroecological, municipal level individual fire report and state archive “Ordenación” plan data for the 1850–2021 period. We hypothesize that the variations in land and cultural fire use through time that we have documented contributed to shape significant differences in forest structure and species composition in two municipalities with similar biophysical environments. Higher fire frequency most likely associated with preindustrial era agro-sylvo-pastoral and resin tapping uses, we argue, contributed to maintain, in one site, an open canopy, savanna-like “dehesa”, heterogenous forest landscape of Pinus pinaster, Quercus pyrenaica and grassland patches with low average annual burnt area whereas, conversely, lower fire frequency associated with stricter state fire exclusion policies and prioritization of timber production in the 20th century contributed to the maintenance of a closed canopy, dense, homogeneous Pinus pinaster forest with higher average burnt area in the other site. These findings have important policy implications for European Mediterranean Basin Forest ecosystems where there is an ongoing debate over the social and ecological impacts of 20th century state fire exclusion policies in the context of widespread rural abandonment, tree cover expansion and densification, shrub encroachment in “dehesa” structured forests and the increased frequency of extreme wildfire events in expanding wildland urban interface areas.

中文翻译：

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对比鲜明的州土地和火灾使用政策决定了西班牙中部两个森林景观的火灾制度、季节性和规模


在本文中，我们描述了西班牙中部格雷多斯山脉两个相邻城市的对比性国家土地利用和火灾管理政策森林景观水平遗产。我们采用探索性顺序混合方法收集 1850-2021 年期间互补的古生物学、树木生态学、市级个体火灾报告和国家档案馆“Ordenación”计划数据。我们假设，我们记录的土地和文化火种利用随时间的变化导致了两个生物物理环境相似的城市森林结构和物种组成的显着差异。我们认为，较高的火灾频率很可能与前工业时代的农林牧业和树脂采伐用途有关，有助于在一个地点维持一个开放的树冠、类似热带草原的“dehesa”、松树、栎树和草原斑块的异质森林景观，年平均燃烧面积较低，而相反，与更严格的国家防火政策和 20 世纪木材生产的优先顺序相关的较低火灾频率导致了维护封闭的树冠、茂密、均匀的松树林，另一个地点的平均燃烧面积较高。这些发现对欧洲地中海盆地森林生态系统具有重要的政策意义，在广泛的农村废弃、树木覆盖扩大和致密化、灌木侵占“dehesa”结构森林以及不断扩大的野地城市界面地区极端野火事件频率增加的背景下，人们对 20 世纪国家防火政策的社会和生态影响存在持续的争论。