Livestock in the service of the forest: an effective tool for fire prevention

Authors

  • Xavier Xortó-Borràs Tècnic de medi ambient, Federació d’Agrupacions de Defensa Forestal Penedès-Garraf

Keywords:

silvopasture, wildfire prevention, forest fires, goats, forests, woodlands, undergrowth.

Abstract

Extensive goat grazing has been introduced in the Montmell Mountains and Ancosa Range (between the Baix Penedès and Anoia regions) as a sustainable forest management measure to obtain strips of low-combustibility land that break up the forest mass and create spaces that help to assure the safety of people working on forest fire extinction and to favor the selfsame extinction of fires. Despite the increase of fire-fighting resources, the improvement of their efficiency and major investments in prevention works, the natural growth of vegetation and the abandonment of rural areas causes the vulnerability of forested areas to grow year after year. Thanks to the effort and hard work of various public administrations, in recent years the number of human-caused forest fires has decreased. Unfortunately, “natural causes” are beyond our control. What we can do, however, is to prevent large-scale forest fires by means of the proper management of inflammable biomass. This paper describes a tool to achieve this end in an ecological, sustainable, economical and feasible way. Obviously, this should not be the only tool applied because the existing methods are not better or worse per se but rather every landscape calls for the most specifically appropriate tools for managing its potential fuel.

Keywords: silvopasture, wildfire prevention, forest fires, goats, forests, woodlands, undergrowth.

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Issue

No. 40: juny 2016

Section

Agroforum

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