Lara Vilar

Associate Professor
Instituto de Economía, Geografía y Demografía
Instituto de Economia Geografia y Demografia CCHS
Spain

Biography

Her research experience is mainly focused in the forest fire occurrence modeling. She has also participated in research projects related to the estimation of biophysical parameters of the vegetation in tree-grass ecosystems (Biospec and Fluxpec). She granted a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (link is external) (IES), Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (link is external)(JRC). She participated here in two research projects from the 7FP: Forest and Land Management Options to prevent unwanted forest fires (FireSmart (link is external)) and Forest Fires under Climate, Social and Economic changes (FUME (link is external)). She worked at the Department of regional geographic analysis and physical geography (link is external) at the University Complutense of Madrid, participating in the FIRE-SCAPE project of historical fires analysis. She did research stays at the Fire Management Systems Laboratory (link is external) (Firelab), faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto (Canada) and at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) in Italy. She performed teaching activities at secondary and bachelor level regarding natural sciences school subjects. She worked doing photo-interpretation activities (SIGPAC (link is external) project) and renewable energy consulting. Nowadays she participates in the Syner-TGE project leaded by M. Pilar Martín and she is the leader of the LUC4FIRE project to Estimate Forest Fire occurrence under Future Land Use/cover Change Scenarios (R&D Projects for Young Researches CSO2015-73407-JIN funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competiveness).

Research Intrest

Environmental Science, Databases, Geographic Information System, Geoinformatics, Geoinformatics (GIS), Wildland Fire, Forest Fires.

List of Publications
Vilar L, Camia A, San-Miguel-Ayanz J, Martín MP. Modeling temporal changes in human-caused wildfires in Mediterranean Europe based on Land Use-Land Cover interfaces. Forest Ecology and Management. 2016 Oct 15;378:68-78.
Vilar L, Gómez I, Martínez-Vega J, Echavarría P, Riaño D, Martín MP. Multitemporal modelling of socio-economic wildfire drivers in Central Spain between the 1980s and the 2000s: comparing generalized linear models to machine learning algorithms. PloS one. 2016 Aug 24;11(8):e0161344.