Sammendrag
Norwegian costal headlands are a manmade landscape that is the result of a nearly five thousand year tradition of maintaining and using these landscapes for grazing. These coastal heathlands are now growing over, which does not only means that we are about to lose this living cultural heritage, but it also poses a great fire hazard as overgrown costal heathlands are very flammable. This was illustrated this summer by the big fire at Sotra, but also in other large outfield fires the later years. These fires are very resource-intensive and dangerous, and we wanted to know how much increased maintenance of the heathlands will reduce this fire hazard.
To analyse this, we combined map layers of different types of landscapes, among them costal heathlands, from Naturbase with other freely available map information about the use of the landscape for recreational purposes and grazing as well as map information about overgrowth. This information was aggregated to a municipality level in GIS and then transferred to another statistics program, SAS, to be combined with data on daily emergency calls to forest and grass/scrub fires, as well as to information about temperature, precipitation and wind conditions. This was then used to conduct statistical regression analysis of how fires in this types of landscapes depend on weather conditions and maintenance. The results from this analysis was used in combination with the costs of putting out these fires as well as the costs of maintenance measures to determine whether or not it is profitable for the society to increase the maintenance of the costal heathlands.
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