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Silver fir carries one avoid listing and one lab number that settles nothing, so no clear verdict stands either way.
A Greek regulation lists it among trees to avoid, while a flammability-traits database only clocks how fast its leaves catch fire, without saying whether that adds up to a risk.
Greece's fire-protection regulation, adopted in 2023 by the Hellenic Ministry of Environment and Energy, keeps a table of particularly flammable endemic trees and shrubs; silver fir is one of the thirty-one species listed, marked avoid like every other entry.
A separate trait database, FLAMITS, published through Dryad and Global Ecology and Biogeography, supplies the only number attached to silver fir: a live leaf sample, tested under a calorimeter in summer, caught flame in about twenty-six seconds. That figure measures how quickly leaf tissue ignites once heated. The database holds nearly twenty thousand such measurements across forty variables, and it does not turn any single measurement into a call for or against a species.
Silver fir is a tree in the Pinaceae family. It is also flagged as invasive in one jurisdiction, a separate matter from flammability, but a factor to weigh before choosing where to plant it. Between one avoid listing and one measurement that takes no side, silver fir has not been shown to resist fire, and it has not been cleared either.
Form
tree
Rated in
Global; Greece
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
The status above is computed from the cited rows below: independent recommendations can support a fire-resistant result, an avoid row can produce keep-away, and disagreement stays visible as conflict. Placement notes preserve each source’s own scheme rather than translating unlike rules into one scale. This is evidence about a plant, not permission to plant it in every part of the defensible space; Zone 0 remains noncombustible.
Where its sources say to plant it
Placement rules below use each source's own distances or named zones, tied to its rating.
They are not interchangeable with the directory's current Zone 0 guidance.
Κανονισμός Πυροπροστασίας Ακινήτων εντός ή πλησίον δασικώ…: section 5.4.2, Table 2δi [greece-2023-particularly-flammable] (with its avoid rating)
The evidence
Grouped by what each source concluded. Primary evidence rated the plant itself
(a lab, field program, or original curation); corroboration compiled or
republished another source's rating and resolves to its root lineage.
21 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Dimitrakopoulos2011: Dimitrakopoulos, A. P., Mitsopoulos, I. D., & Kaliva, A. (2011). Short communication. Comparing flammability traits among fire-stricken (low elevation) and non fire- stricken (high elevation) conifer forest species of Europe: a test of the Mutch hypothesis. Forest Systems, 22, 134-137.
Shared row context: plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying no; device calorimeter; site Dimitrakopoulos2011-1; sampling summer.
