Forest fires and the role of military contaminated sites on forest and succession areas in Brandenburg

• With a total area of 575,000 hectares and a third of the forest area, Brandenburg is the federal state with the highest contamination of old ammunition in Germany.
• The ten largest forest fires in Brandenburg since 2002 are all located in forest areas contaminated with munitions, each extending to more than 200 hectares and covering 3301 hectares in total.
• Self-ignition of old ammunition caused damage to 851 hectares of forest in 2019 - this corresponds to almost 63 % of the total burned area of all forest fires in Brandenburg in 2019.