22 septiembre 2020

The summer course ‘AGROFORESTRY SYSTEMS AND FIRE PREVENTION: PRESCRIBED BURNING AND PASTORING’ organized by the Silvopastoral Systems Research Group of the Terra Campus of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) was held between days 1-4 of September 2020.

This summer course was channeled through the Center for Own Studies of the USC and had the participation of more than 40 students, including representatives from sectors as diverse as medicine, veterinary medicine and engineers from the agricultural and forestry fields, as well as forest firefighters and members of the Fifth Battalion of the Military Emergency Unit (UME).

The course was organized in three days of lectures and online presentations that enabled the students enrolled in the course to expand their knowledge about agroforestry systems, land management strategies and fire prevention, forest management and biodiversity, responses of woody communities to grazing and Pasto-Cortafuego areas of Andalusia. On the last day of the course, the students visited the plots in Los Ancares where the pilot experience of the Interreg Sudoe ‘Open2preserve’ project is being developed, in which guided herbivory practices and initial techniques of fuel reduction through controlled burning are combined.

The professor of the Department of Plant Production and Engineering Projects of the Higher Polytechnic School, María Rosa Mosquera Losada, who directed this summer course together with Dr. Nuria Ferreiro Domínguez, highlighted at the end of the course the good reception that this training activity had with a program aimed at solving fire prevention.