The role of fire as a restoration tool for biodiversity and fire regimes in abandoned mountain areas of southern Europe

Abstract Background Prescribed fire is a widely used management tool for fire-adapted ecosystems worldwide, primarily aimed at mitigating the risk of high-severity wildfires by reducing surface fuel loads. However, its implementation in Southern Europe is still scarce due to legal and socioecological constraints. One key barrier is the limited knowledge of its effects on biodiversity, which is particularly relevant in legally protected areas. This study focuses on the Transboundary Biosphere Reserve Gerês-Xurés (Portugal and Spain), a representative mountain landscape of northwestern Iberia shaped by rural abandonment and frequent wildfires. Although these landscapes show resilience to low- and moderate-severity fires, the characteristics of an optimal fire regime—one that both supports biodiversity and reduces overall wildfire risk—remain unclear. Results In this context, prescribed fire emerges as a promising nature-based solution. To evaluate its potential, we assessed the impacts of twenty planning scenarios that integrate different prescribed fire strategies and fire-smart landscape policies, on 114 vertebrate species. These scenarios are built upon five different storylines, including business-as-usual , agricultural mosaics ( High Nature Value Farmland —HNVF), forest mosaics ( Fire-Smart ), agroforestry mosaics (HNVF + Fire-Smart ), and prescribed fire (PF), and combinations of these storylines. Habitat availability for endemic species is expected to increase under prescribed fire scenarios (21–24%). For threatened species, agricultural and agroforestry scenarios (without prescribed fire) increase habitat availability even more by about 28%. However, combining prescribed fire with agricultural or agroforestry mosaics may result in increases of up to 37–42% for these species. For protected species, prescribed fire scenarios may increase habitat availability by 13–20%, rising to 25% in scenarios combined with agricultural and agroforestry mosaics. Conclusions The results indicate that integrating prescribed fire with agricultural and agroforestry mosaics can promote significant improvements in habitat availability thus backing the view that prescribed fires, especially when combined with sustainable agroforestry practices, can become a suitable biodiversity management tool.