It almost feels like magic. Cypresses that resist the flames of fires. An enigma that for three years has ignited souls in Andilla, in the province of Valencia, where a group of cypresses has remained intact, while the flames around it devoured everything else
It almost feels like magic. Cypresses that resist the flames of fire. An enigma that for three years has ignited souls in Andilla, in the province of Valencia, where a group of cypresses has remained intact, while the flames around it devoured everything else.
More than 20.000 hectares of forest were charred following a fire that broke out in 2012. In the midst of the devastation, a cluster of cypress trees remained green and upright.
Since then, scientists have tried to uncover the "mystery" of the cypresses. The anecdotes and the first tests have confirmed the particular resistance of the Mediterranean cypress. Once there, the botanists checked the vegetation present on the site of the disaster, consisting of oaks, Aleppo pines, sea pines and junipers, all completely burned.
The Spanish scientists, the botanist Bernabé Moya, together with his brother, the environmental engineer José Moya, could not believe their eyes. So they tried to figure out how the trees could provide some sort of buffer zone to hinder the spread of fires.
Andilla is an experimental forest of CypFire, a project funded by the European Union established in 1980 to test the resistance of more than 50 varieties of Mediterranean cypress to a pathogenic fungus.
The fire that hit it in 2012 gave researchers the opportunity to discover the particularities of this plant.
"We felt profound sadness at the thought of losing land of such value for the conservation of biodiversity", he said Bernabé Moya to the BBC. “But we had the hope that perhaps some of the cypresses were saved. When we arrived we saw that all common oaks, holm oaks, pines and junipers were completely burned ".
But only 1,27% of the Mediterranean cypresses had been destroyed by the flames. The extraordinary case of Valencia gave birth to one international study three years to find the reasons behind the resilience of this species.
What made sure that the cypresses were saved? According to what scientists have reported, the merit is both of the earth at the base of the cypresses, who acted as a sponge holding back the water, both of the leaves.
The laboratory tests were conducted by scientists from the INIA-CIFOR Forest Fire Laboratory in Spain and by theInstitute for the Sustainable Protection of Plants of Florence (IPSP).
"In the past, this species has not been studied in depth but only some parameters have been considered," explained Gianni Della Rocca, research technologist at the IPSP.
A difference fundamental gods new test is that they were performed not only on dead dry specimens but also on thin twigs alive with leaves of different sizes that revealed one of the main features of the species: his high water content.
"We have observed that the Mediterranean cypress, due to the particular structure of its leaves, is able to retain a high water content, even in situations of extreme heat and drought, and this is a very favorable starting point as regards the risk of fire ", explains Della Rocca.
The earth present at the base of the trees is also formed by small fragments of leaves, which have created an intricate and compact layer that is slow to decompose.
Man-made fires are one of the most frequent causes of forest degradation in the Mediterranean region. More than 269.000 fires were reported in the region between 2006 and 2010, with more than two million hectares of forest land gone up in smoke, according to the FAO.
And who knows it's not really there Natura to have found a way to defend themselves by man.
Francesca Mancuso
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