Mediterranean landscapes are in a state of flux due to the impacts of changing land‐use patterns and climate. Fuel–weather interactions determine that large, severe wildfires are increasingly common. Prescribed burning in southern Europe is therefore justified by the need to manage fire‐prone vegetation types and maintain cultural landscapes that provide a range of ecosystem services. Prescribed fire has neutral or positive effects on soils and biodiversity, in contrast to wildfires, which can be extremely damaging. However, the limited extent of current applications are unlikely to reduce wildfire hazard or carbon emissions. Adoption of prescribed burning in the Mediterranean region has been slow, uneven, and inconsistent, and its development is constrained by cultural and socioeconomic factors as well as by specific factors related to demography, land use, and landscape structure. Sustainable fire management requires expansion of managers' ability to use prescribed burning, a varied response to unplanned fires, and modified regulation of burning associated with traditional agricultural land uses.

This study assessed the effectiveness of different methods of reducing soil erosion after a severe wildfire in Galicia (NW Spain). The treatments compared were: straw mulch (2.5 Mg ha–1), wood-chip mulch (4 Mg ha–1), cut-shrub barriers and control. Straw mulch provided an initial ground cover of 80% and the wood chips only 45%. Sediment yields were measured by means of sediment fences in 500-m2 bordered plots. During the first year after wildfire, mean precipitation was 1520 mm. The mean sediment yield in the control plots was 35 Mg ha–1. During this period, only straw mulch application significantly reduced soil erosion relative to controls (66%). The mean sediment yields in the wood-chip mulch and erosion barrier treatments, 33 and 30 Mg ha–1 respectively, were similar to rates in the untreated plots (35 Mg ha–1). Soil erosion decreased sharply during the second year after wildfire when mean precipitation was 1194 mm. Vegetation regrowth was very fast and treatments had no significant effect on the rate of recovery of vegetation cover, which was ~80% at the end of the study. The results obtained showed that ground cover was a key factor in determining post-fire soil loss. Stabilisation treatments such as wood-chip mulch and erosion barriers were not effective in reducing soil loss relative to the untreated control.