Pyrolysate gas mixtures are multivariate and relative in nature. Statistical techniques applied to these data generally ignore their relative nature. Published data for permanent gases (CO, CO2, H2, CH4) and tars produced by pyrolysing 15 wildland fuels were reanalysed using compositional data analysis techniques. Mass and mole fractions were compositionally equivalent. Plant species, moisture status

Nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) landowners are a dominant forest landownership group in the south-eastern United States and play a crucial role in regular fuel management for effective landscape-level wildfire hazard reduction. However, little is known about their intentions to implement fuel reduction treatments in the future. This study estimated the likelihood that NIPF landowner will implement

Risk management is a significant part of federal wildland fire management in the USA because policy encourages the use of fire to maintain and restore ecosystems while protecting life and property. In this study, patterns of wildfire risk were explored from operational relative risk assessments (RRA) completed by land managers on 5087 wildfires from 2010 to 2017 in every geographic area of the USA

This paper applies the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs (MACA) statistical downscaling method to 12 general circulation models to produce 21st century projections of fire weather variables over Victoria, Australia, under two emissions scenarios. The statistically downscaled model data accurately replicate the observed distributions of meteorological variables over the contemporary period,

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to cause an increase in fire danger over south-eastern Australia during the 21st century, primarily driven by increased surface temperature. Studies of future fire weather in Victoria, Australia, have so far mostly utilised direct output from general circulation models, which have inadequate resolution for resolving the dynamics of local fire danger and are

The main purpose of this study was to characterise the thermal environment and risk of heat burns of wildland firefighters in relation to the suppression tasks performed in real wildland fires. Measurements of air temperature and heat flux were performed by affixing heat flux and ambient temperature sensors on the outer and inner surface of the wildland firefighters’ protective garments. Suppression

Treed peatlands exhibit both crown and smouldering fire potential; however, neither are included in Canadian wildfire management models and, as such, they are not formally represented in management decision-making. The lack of smouldering fire risk assessment is a critical research gap as these fires can represent heavy resource draws and are predominant sources of smoke, air pollutants and atmospheric

Mechanical mastication is growing in popularity as a wildfire mitigation technique. Yet few studies quantify its effects on fire behaviour. Such information is needed by fire managers to evaluate its efficacy. Our aim was to develop an understanding of how mastication alters flaming and smouldering durations and the longevity of any effects. Flaming and smouldering duration are important determinants

Abrupt changes in wind direction and speed can dramatically impact wildfire development and spread, endangering firefighters. A frequent cause of such wind shifts is outflow from thunderstorms and organised convective systems; thus, their identification and prediction present critical challenges for fire weather forecasters. Here, we develop a methodology and implement it in a software tool that can

Terrestrial gastropods are keenly sensitive to changes in vegetation structure owing to their dependence on moisture. For this reason, low survivorship and recolonisation are to be expected after a fire. The fire described in this paper probably started as a result of the deliberate spring burning of vegetation that got out of control. Analysis of the data collected immediately after the fire does

Fire spread associated with violent pyrogenic convection is highly unpredictable and difficult to suppress. Wildfire-driven convection may generate cumulonimbus (storm) clouds, also known as pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb). Research into such phenomena has tended to treat the fire on the surface and convection in the atmosphere above as separate processes. We used a numerical model to examine the effect

Violent fire-driven convection can manifest as towering pyrocumulus (pyroCu) or pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) clouds, which can have devastating impacts on the environment and society. Their associated fire spread is erratic, unpredictable and not generally suppressible. Research into large pyroconvective events has mainly focused on the atmospheric processes involved in normal atmospheric convection,

Fuels treatments and fire suppression operations during a fire are the two management influences on wildfire severity, yet their influence is rarely quantified in landscape-scale analyses. We leveraged a combination of datasets including custom canopy fuel layers and post-fire field data to analyse drivers of fire severity in a large wildfire in the southern Cascade Range, California, USA. We used

Fire use is increasingly recognised as a central component of integrated land management in fire-prone places. Historically, fire use has been commonplace in many places in Ireland, where field burning is an established practice with a long pedigree among upland farmers seeking to improving forage among other benefits. This practice has been subject to controversy as wildfires – a hazard often associated

As organic porous soil, peat is prone to self-heating ignition, a type of spontaneous initiation of fire that can take place at ambient temperatures without an external source. Despite the urgency to tackle peat fires, the understanding of the self-heating ignition of peat is insufficient. In this study, a computational model that integrates the mechanisms of heat transfer, mass transfer and chemistry

Currently, our ability to link wildland fire behaviour to fire effects is through the lens of fire severity assessments, because there are no ground-based post-fire metrics that are able to quantitively capture aspects of heat transfer to plants. This presents a particular challenge when considering tree mortality linked to cambial damage, which can occur in both low-intensity surface fires through

Long periods of drought and mild winters have significantly affected the forests of the Czech Republic in recent years. If this trend continues, forest stands will be weakened and dehydrated, which will increase the probability that forest fires will occur and spread. It is essential that fire managers prepare for this possibility. A main requirement for extinguishing large forest fires is the availability

Modelling the propagation of wildfires requires an accurate wind field to correctly predict the behaviour of the fire. Although numerical weather prediction models produce reliable and accurate mesoscale forecasts, these are typically either available at a spatial resolution many times greater than the typical resolution of a wildfire model or a spot forecast that must be spatially interpolated to

The Daxinganling Region, in Heilongjiang Province, China, has experienced considerable losses to forest resources owing to a recent increase in forest fire frequency. This necessitates the predictions of fire behaviour in this region, which requires assessment of fuel moisture content (FMC) at appropriate space and time intervals. Here, we compare and extrapolate results of vapour-exchange methods

The Rothermel fire spread model provides the scientific basis for the US National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) and several other important fire management applications. This study proposes a new perspective of the model that partitions the reaction intensity function and Energy Release Component (ERC) equations as an alternative that simplifies calculations while providing more insight into the

Smouldering wildfire is an important disturbance to peatlands worldwide; it contributes significantly to global carbon emissions and provides positive feedback to climate change. Herein, we explore the feasibility of firebreaks to control smouldering peat fires through laboratory-scale experiments. The dry-mass moisture content (MC) of peat soil was varied from 10% (air-dried) to 125%. We found that

This study examined the shift parameters that contribute to sleep loss and on-duty fatigue in British Columbia Wildfire Service (BCWS) firefighters using sleep–wake data, work–rest data and alertness and fatigue predictions from a biomathematical model (BMM) of fatigue. A total of 40 firefighters (age: 30.4 ± 11.6 years; 13 F, 26 M) volunteered over a 14-day consecutive fireline deployment, followed

Frequent, small wildfires can pose dangers to homes in the wildland–urban interface, but are not often included in wildfire hazard models. We assessed patterns of small wildfire occurrence probability in the Northeast region of the United States, focusing on (1) spatial and seasonal variations; (2) differences between small and large fires (size threshold of 4 ha); and (3) how predicted probabilities

It is difficult to detect forest fires in complex backgrounds owing to the many interfering factors in forest fire smoke. In this paper, a novel method that combines Time Domain Robust Principal Component Analysis (TRPCA) and a Two-Stream Composed of Visual Geometry Group Network (VGG) and Bi-Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) (TSVB) model is proposed for forest fire smoke detection. First, features are

Forests exhibit thresholds in disturbance intervals that influence sustainability of production and natural values including sawlog production, species existence and habitat attributes. Fire is a key disturbance agent in temperate forests and frequency of fire is increasing, threatening sustainability of these forest values. We used mechanistically diverse, theoretical fire interval distributions for

The application of water, or water mixed with suppressants, to combat wildfires is one of the most common firefighting methods but is rarely studied for smouldering peat wildfire, which is the largest type of fire worldwide in term of fuel consumption. We performed experiments by spraying suppressant to the top of a burning peat sample inside a reactor. A plant-based wetting agent suppressant was mixed

The estimation of post-fire vegetation recovery is essential for forest management and wildfire policy-making. In the last few decades, vegetation indices have been widely used to monitor post-fire vegetation recovery by comparison with the pre-fire state. In this study, vegetation recovery is estimated using Solar-Induced chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF), which is a by-product of photosynthesis and

Wildfires are an important driver of land degradation, with detrimental impacts on soil properties, usually leading to decreasing soil fertility and erosion, which affect vegetation recovery. This study investigates the long-term impact of wildfires on topsoil horizons and vegetation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where land degradation is causing significant economic and ecological losses. Ten years after

History of prescription burning and wildfires in the three Sierra Nevada National Park Service (NPS) parks and adjacent US Forest Service (USFS) forests is presented. Annual prescription (Rx) burns began in 1968 in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, followed by Yosemite National Park and Lassen Volcanic National Park. During the last third of the 20th century, USFS national forests adjacent to

This paper analyses the factors behind wildfire propagation in a Mediterranean European country, Portugal, using a set of variables related to vegetation and climatic, topography and human aspects. Spatial cluster analysis was used to find homogeneous regions, and two-part regression models were used to model the contribution of the different elements driving extensive fire propagation. Our findings

Forest fire risk in Finland is estimated with the Finnish Forest Fire Index (FFI), which predicts the fuel moisture content (FMC) of the forest floor. We studied the FMC variation of four typical ground vegetation fuels, Pleurozium schreberi, Hylocomium splendens, Dicranum spp., and Cladonia spp., and raw humus in mature and recently clear-cut stands. Of these, six were sub-xeric Pinus sylvestris stands

The distribution of fuels is recognised as a key driver of wildland fire behaviour. However, our understanding of how fuel density heterogeneity affects fire behaviour is limited because of the challenges associated with experiments that isolate fuel heterogeneity from other factors. Advances in fire behaviour modelling and computational resources provide a means to explore fire behaviour responses

Straw mulch is commonly applied to land after high-severity wildfires because of its effectiveness in reducing post-fire runoff and erosion. However, information about the effect on vegetation recovery is still scarce and usually limited to the first 2 years after wildfire. In this study, the effects of straw helimulching on vegetation recovery and species composition were assessed in 30 experimental

Daily, fine-scale spatially explicit wildland fire occurrence prediction (FOP) models can inform fire management decisions. Many different data-driven modelling methods have been used for FOP. Several studies use multiple modelling methods to develop a set of candidate models for the same region, which are then compared against one another to choose a final model. We demonstrate that the methodologies

The devastating bushfires of the 2019–20 summer are arguably the most costly natural disaster in Australian recorded history. What is little known is that these fires severely affected the temperate highland peat swamps on sandstone (THPSS), a form of upland wetland that occurs in the water supply catchments of Sydney in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area and National Park. During the fires

US fire scientists are developing Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations, also known as ‘PODs’, as a pre-fire season planning tool to promote safe and effective wildland fire response, strengthen risk management approaches in fire management and better align fire management objectives. PODs are a collaborative planning approach based on spatial analytics to identify potential wildfire control

Catastrophic wildfires are often a result of dynamic fire behaviours. They can cause rapid escalation of fire behaviour, increasing the danger to ground-based emergency personnel. To date, few studies have characterised merging fire behaviours outside the laboratory. The aim of this study was to develop a simple, fast and accurate method to track fire front propagation using emerging technologies to

Wildfires have increasingly damaged Andean tropical forests. However, both a poor understanding of wildfire dynamics and ecosystem response limits awareness about the magnitude of the problem and design management strategies. We estimate the impacts and significant drivers of wildfires by dating and mapping recent wildfires in an Andean tropical forest area, the Iguaque mountains. A large part of Iguaque

The increased frequency and spread of tropical peat fires over the last two decades have attracted global attention because they cause significant environmental and health impacts at local to global scales. To understand the relative importance of key factors controlling tropical peatland burning events, we developed PeatFire, an agent-based model simulating the interaction between human-induced ignitions

A significant amount of research has examined what motivates people living in fire-prone areas to mitigate their wildfire risk (i.e. engage in activities that reduce vulnerability and the effects of a wildfire on an individual’s property). However, drawing overarching conclusions from this research is difficult because of the myriad of ways researchers have measured and analysed wildfire risk mitigation

Throughout history California has been subjected to large catastrophic wildfires and the trend seems to be accelerating in recent years. We analysed and mapped the spatial–temporal patterns of predicted wildfire occurrence across California from 2000 until the end of the century. We identified areas that are extremely vulnerable to wildfires and analysed the threat to the wildland–urban interface and

This paper examines the relationship between local elections and wildfire. Using data of wildfires in Greek municipalities between 2000 and 2010, I estimate models comparing wildfire outcomes in local election years against non-election years. I find that wildfire occurrence and burned area are systematically lower in the years around local elections. In municipalities where incumbents run for re-election

The initiation and spread of wildfires depend, among others, on the live fuel moisture content (LFMC) in plants. Whereas the intrinsic and environmental drivers of LFMC in individual plants are fairly well understood, less is known about ecological interactions potentially affecting LFMC in diverse plant communities. Here, we asked how the interaction between climate and species diversity affects the

An automated burned area extraction routine that attempts to overcome the particular difficulties of remote sensing applications in complex landscapes is presented and tested in the mountainous region of northwest Yunnan, China. In particular, the lack of burned samples to use for training and testing, the rugged relief, the small size of fires and the constant presence of clouds during the rainy season

Identifying the number of firebrands generated during wildfires is an important aspect of understanding their propagation. A key challenge in quantifying the number of firebrands released is to distinguish those that are ‘hot’ and could lead to further fire spread from the total number released. Recently, a fire-resistant fabric was used to quantify the number of ‘hot’ firebrands released from different

Various classifications of fuel accumulation models are used to describe the complex temporal relationship between fuel loads and vegetation dynamics. Fuel accumulation models are an important tool in wildfire management as fuel is the only component that can be directly controlled by fire managers. Here we discuss various strengths and limitations of analytical fuel accumulation models that exist

This paper identifies key fire history and fire-related spatial databases that can be utilised for effective planning and assessment of prescribed burns in south-eastern Queensland. To ensure that appropriate fire regimes are maintained for specific management objectives (e.g. biodiversity conservation or risk management), and to assist fire managers with planning prescribed fire and post-fire assessments

We used a value of information approach to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of using satellite imagery as part of the Burn Area Emergency Response (BAER), a US federal program that identifies imminent post-wildfire threats to human life and safety, property and critical natural or cultural resources. We compared the costs associated with producing a Burn Area Reflectance Classification map and implementing

The public health emergency associated with the 2019–20 bushfires in Australia was a wake-up call to increase the resilience of our health systems to respond to climate extremes. We must combine our understanding of predictions of extreme weather events with our knowledge on emergency preparedness and response to protect the health of citizens.

Soil moisture depletion during the growing season can induce plant water stress, thereby driving declines in grassland fuel moisture and accelerating curing. These drying and curing dynamics and their dependencies on soil moisture are inadequately represented in fire danger models. To elucidate these relationships, grassland fuelbed characteristics and soil moisture were monitored in nine patches of

The climate of the south-western United States and northern Mexico borderlands is marked by a bimodal precipitation regime with the majority of moisture arriving during the cool season via Pacific frontal storm systems, and intense convective storms during the North American Monsoon (NAM). The fire season occurs primarily during the arid foresummer in May and June, before the development of the NAM

National and regional preparedness level (PL) designations support decisions about wildfire risk management. Such decisions occur across the fire season and influence pre-positioning of resources in areas of greatest fire potential, recall of personnel from off-duty status, requests for back-up resources from other areas, responses to requests to share resources with other regions during fire events

Biomass fires in Indonesia emit high levels of greenhouse gases and particulate matter, key contributors to global climate change and poor air quality in south-east Asia. In order to better understand the drivers of biomass fires across Indonesia over multiple years, we examined the distribution and probability of fires in Sumatra, Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) and Papua (western New Guinea) over

There has been an increasing interest in the economic health cost from smoke exposure from wildfires in the past 20 years, particularly in the north-western USA that is reflected in an emergent literature. In this review, we provide an overview and discussion of studies since 2006 on the health impacts of wildfire smoke and of approaches for the estimation of the associated economic cost. We focus

From a western society’s perspective, wildfires are catastrophic events that jeopardise biodiversity and cause soil erosion, not to mention risk to human lives and properties. However, many Mediterranean-type ecosystems are not only resilient to wildfires but sensitive to the lack of wildfires. This communication focuses on the Mediterranean heathland or herriza as a paradigmatic fire-prone ecosystem

Prescribed burning is a common land management tool used to reduce fuels, emulate the effects of wildfire and increase heterogeneity in fire-prone ecosystems. However, the forest structure created by prescribed burning is likely to be dissimilar to that produced by wildfire. We used three-dimensional estimates of canopy bulk density (CBD) from lidar data to explore the relationship between fire type

The simultaneous occurrence of wildfire can hinder firefighting effectiveness via multiple mechanisms that might explain historical resource demand trends. We validate this hypothesis by using data from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project to determine if simultaneous wildfire occurrence is correlated with preparedness levels and examine potential changes in simultaneous wildfire activity

Several studies have separately explored accumulation of the dominant fuels (grass, fine litter (<6 mm diameter) and coarse woody debris (CWD, 6–50 mm diameter)) in north Australian savannas. We report an analysis of two longitudinal datasets describing how these three fuel components covary in abundance throughout the year in eucalypt-dominated savanna over a rainfall gradient of 700–1700 mm mean

As wildfires occurring at the wildland–urban interface (WUI) continue to become more severe, there is an increasing need to understand human behaviour in these situations, and evacuation decision-making in particular. To contribute to this understanding, an online survey (using both mail and online sampling methods) was disseminated to households impacted by the 2016 Chimney Tops 2 fire in Tennessee

Fire management agencies use fire behaviour simulation tools to predict the potential spread of a fire in both risk planning and operationally during wildfires. These models are generally based on underlying empirical or quasi-empirical relations and rarely are uncertainties considered. Little attention has been given to the quality of the input data used during operational fire predictions. We examined