Abstract

Wildfires in Chile are mainly concentrated in the Mediterranean Central zone, which coincides with a highly threatened global biodiversity hotspot. We (i) identify the burned areas and the inter-annual trends of wildfires in the natural ecosystems of continental Chile between 2000 and 2018, considering the ecosystem threat level based on IUCN criteria, and (ii) identify recovery of the burned zones after the 2017 megafires. We quantified burned area/month and number of wildfires/ pixel and we overlapped wildfire and IUCN red list maps. We analyzed monthly remotely-sensed recovering indices in the ecosystems most affected by the 2017 megafires. We found that remnant deciduous and sclerophyllous forests were the most affected, accounting for 40% and 35.6% of the total wildfire cover, respectively. 50.6% of the wildfire area was in coastal ecosystems categorized as Vulnerable. We found a rapid increase of vegetation cover from December 2017 to October 2018 after megafires. Coastal ecosystems experienced serious damage by wildfires during the last decade, what could have a synergic effect, with land use and climate change, generating the risk of potential collapse of these valuable ecosystems.