Wildfires are a key ecosystem process that modulates vegetation distribution and evolution (Bond et al., 2005) and impacts the global carbon cycle (Jones et al., 2019), whilst having substantial economic and social impacts (Moritz et al., 2014). During the last two decades, most of the extreme wildfires reported as being economically or socially catastrophic were concentrated in suburban areas intermixed with flammable forests, particularly in the western United States (Radeloff et al., 2018), southeastern Australia (Bowman et al., 2017) and the Mediterranean Basin (Modugno et al., 2016). The latter was specifically identified as a disaster-prone landscape with projections suggesting an increase of extreme fire weather of 50%-100% by the end of the current century (Bowman et al., 2017). Currently, most of the total burned area in Europe occurs in this region during the summer, with an average of about 4,500 km 2 /yr, an area that is expected to increase (Ganteaume et al., 2013; Turco et al., 2017).