complexity

Numerous wildfire management agencies and institutions rely primarily on simple risk approaches to wildfire that focus on technical risk assessments that do not reflect the complexity of contemporary wildfire risk.

Wildland fire behavior research has largely focused on the steady-state interactions between fuels and heat fluxes. Contemporary research is revealing new questions outside the bounds of this simplified approach.

Wildfire ecosystems are thought to be self‐regulated through pattern–process interactions between ignition frequency and location, and patterns of burned and recovering vegetation. Yet, recent increases in the frequency of large wildfires call into question the application of self‐organization theory to landscape resilience.