SMOS and climate data applicability for analyzing forest decline and forest fires

Forests partially reduce climate change impact but, at the same time, this climate forcing threatens forest's health. In recent decades, droughts are becoming more frequent and intense implying an increase of forest decline episodes and forest fires. In this context, global and frequent soil moisture observations from the ESA's SMOS mission could be useful in controlling forest exposure to decline and fires. In this paper, SMOS observations and several climate variables are analyzed together with decline and fire inventories, to study the effect of soil moisture on forest decline during an important drought on summer 2012, and on forest fires in the period 2010-2013. Results show that SMOS-derived soil moisture is a complementary variable in forest decline models. Some of the studied tree species exhibit high probability of decline occurrence under dry conditions. First results showed burned areas to be drier than unburned ones previous to the fire occurrences.