María L. Chas-Amil

The demand for paper and paperboard: econometric models for the European Union

Cost minimization theory suggests national demand equations for paper and paperboard in which demand is a negative function of the price of paper and paperboard, and a positive function of gross national product. A dynamic version of this model was estimated with data from European Union countries, for newsprint, printing and writing paper, and other paper and paperboard. Country-by-country equations proved unstable. Pooling the data across countries, with dummy variables to account for fixed country effects, led to well defined short-term and long-term elasticities with respect to price and gross national product. The hypothesis that income and price elasticities were the same across the European Union countries could not be rejected at the 1% significance level, for the three product groups. From 1969 to 1995, most of the growth in demand had been due to the growth in national product, while price increases had only a small negative effect.

Spatial distribution of human-caused forest fires in Galicia (NW Spain).

It is crucial for fire prevention policies to assess the spatial patterns of human-started fires and their relationship with geographical and socioeconomic aspects. This study uses fire reports for the period 1988-2006 in Galicia, Spain, to analyze the spatial distribution of human-induced fire risk attending to causes and underlying motivations associated with fire ignitions. Our results show that there are four distinctive types of municipalities in this region according to the incidence of intentional agricultural-livestock fires, pyromaniacal behavior, negligence, and unknown causes. They highlight that study of the spatial properties of the human causes and motivations of forest fire activity can provide valuable information for detecting the presence of non-random clusters of fires of various causes in particular locations, where fire management planning should be evaluated more in depth.

Forecasting intentional wildfires using temporal and spatiotemporal autocorrelations

We report daily time series models containing both temporal and spatiotemporal lags, which are applied to forecasting intentional wildfires in Galicia, Spain. Models are estimated independently for each of the 19 forest districts in Galicia using a 1999-2003 training dataset and evaluated out-of-sample with a 2004-06 dataset. Poisson autoregressive models of order P - PAR(P) models - significantly out-perform competing alternative models over both in-sample and out-of-sample datasets, reducing out-of-sample root-mean-squared errors by an average of 15%. PAR(P) and static Poisson models included covariates deriving from crime theory, including the temporal and spatiotemporal autoregressive time series components. Estimates indicate highly significant autoregressive components, lasting up to 3 days, and spatiotemporal autoregression, lasting up to 2 days. Models also applied to predict the effect of increased arrest rates for illegal intentional firesetting indicate that the direct long-run effect of an additional firesetting arrest, summed across forest districts in Galicia, is -139.6 intentional wildfires, equivalent to a long-run elasticity of -0.94. Language: en

Fire Risk At The Wildland-urban Interface:A Case Study Of A Galician County

In Galicia (Spain), wildfires are one of the main environmental problems, with an annual average of close to 8,600 forest fires between 1999 and 2008. Most of these fires are intentionally ignited. It is therefore crucial for fire prevention policies to assess human-started fires and their relationship with socioeconomic aspects. In this paper we focus on the spatial pattern of human presence in the territory as an important determinant on forest fires ignitions. We identify, classified and map wildland-urban interface (WUI) and assess fire risk by types of WUI in a Galician county with one of the highest incidence of forest fires during the studied period (1999-2008). Following Lampin-Maillet et al. (Mapping wildland-urban interfaces at large scales integrating housing density and vegetation aggregation for fire prevention in the South of France. Journal of Environmental Management 2010) approach, and based on a combination of a map of buildings, obtained from the National Topographic Base, and the SIOSE land-cover map (Information system of land use cover in Spain) we distinguished among 12 types of interfaces. Our results show a significant relationship between the different types of WUI and the spatial patterns of wildfire ignition points. The highest density of fire ignition points was found in non-forest WUI with either dispersed or very dense clustered buildings.