Understanding the socioeconomic drivers of agricultural land abandonment and associated fire risk in Greece

In recent decades, fire-prone areas in the Mediterranean region have experienced significant agricultural land abandonment, which can increase fire risk due to fuel accumulation and increased fuel continuity. In the case of Greece, which is increasingly affected by large fires, there is no quantitative assessment of the increased fire risk due to abandoned lands, and little understanding of the drivers of land abandonment.The overarching objective of the proposed research is to address these knowledge gaps and inform policy, land planning, and fire management efforts by integrating state-of-the-art remote sensing mapping methodology with socioeconomic empirical analyses for three regions in southern Greece from 1990 to 2019. Specifically, this project will: 1) map abandoned agricultural land across the study area using Landsat time series data, 2) quantify changes in fire risk as a function of time-since-abandonment, using field-derived vegetation cover and structure measurements as input for wildfire modeling, 3) develop spatially explicit multivariate statistical models using socioeconomic, sociocultural, and geophysical variables to identify drivers of agricultural land abandonment for several time periods corresponding to major agriculture policy changes and economic crises, and 4) identify policies and incentives most likely to encourage land management practices that reduce fire risk using a discrete choice experimental survey. This project will make extensive use of NASA remote sensing assets (Landsat Collection 1 data and high spatial resolution data available through National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Commercial Archive Data). Ultimately, this project will contribute new knowledge regarding underlying socioeconomic drivers of agricultural land abandonment and the resulting consequences of this land use change, such as changes in fire risk. The proposed research is directly responsive to the current solicitation goals and has high societal relevance given the project results will inform policy makers and land managers on agriculture and land management policy solutions that reduce fire risk. This proposed project also makes substantial contributions to: 1) NASA LCLUC program goals of understanding human dimensions of LCLUC and impacts of LCLUC on the management of natural resources, and 2) international programs, such as the GOFC-GOLD Mediterranean network (MedRIN), through the direct participation of several regional collaborators in the proposed research.