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Greek fir's fire rating depends on who is asked.
Greece's 2023 property fire-safety regulation names Abies cephalonica in its table of particularly flammable endemic trees, and the listing carries no seasonal qualifier. INRA's Mediterranean forestry station in Avignon ran ignition tests across the year and gave it a fire-season peak of 2 on its 0-to-5 scale, low enough to land in the recommend range.
Each source measures something different, not a disagreement about the plant itself. Greece's rule is a legal classification written for properties near forest land, sorted into two categories with no month-by-month nuance. INRA's number comes from a controlled ignition test repeated across twelve months in an Avignon lab, apart from terrain, wind, or drought. A specimen that resists ignition on that bench can still be treated as a liability under a law written for actual hillsides.
A third figure comes from a different kind of test and does not settle the disagreement. Predried foliage burned in a calorimeter gave off about 4,946 kilocalories per kilogram, a reading FLAMITS files under combustibility rather than ease of ignition. A plant can burn hot once lit while still being slow to catch, or the reverse. FLAMITS holds this figure among nearly twenty thousand measurements and does not use it to pick a side.
Botanically, it is grouped in Pinaceae, the pine family. Taken together, the primary evidence tips fire resistant, but only barely, and that lean sits beside a Greek regulation that calls the same tree a hazard near buildings. Anyone planting it close to a house should weigh both readings, not just the one that sounds reassuring.
Form
tree
Region
France; Greece; Mediterranean France
Rated in
Global; Greece; Mediterranean France / Provence
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — 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.
23 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Liodakis2002: Liodakis, S., Bakirtzis, D., & Lois, E. (2002). TG and autoignition studies on forest fuels. Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry, 69, 519-528.
Shared row context: plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying yes; site Liodakis2002-2; sampling january.
“calorific value (kcal/kg): 4946.22”
FLAMITS record 6549; Combustibility measurement; device calorimeter.
Primary study Ntoufas2016: Ntoufas, I., Liodakis, S., & Tzamtzis, N. (2016). The effect of the extractable components of euro-mediterranean vegetation species to the combustion of their foliage. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, 2850.
Shared row context: plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying no; site Ntoufas2016-1; sampling february.
Primary study Valette1990: Valette, J.-C. (1990). Flammabilities of Mediterranean forest species. Effects on the combustibility of the forest communities inflammabilités des espèces forestières méditerranéennes. Conséquences sur la combustibilité des formations forestières. Revue forestière française, 42, 76-92.
Shared row context: Ignitability measurement; plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying no; device epiradiator; site Valette1990-1; sampling june to september.
