fire behavior

Vegetation structure affects the vulnerability of a forest to drought events and wildfires. Management decisions, such as thinning intensity and type of understory treatment, influence competition for water resources and amount of fuel available.

Wildfire sizes and proportions burned with high severity effects are increasing in seasonally dry forests, especially in the western USA. A critical need in efforts to restore or maintain these forest ecosystems is to determine where fuel build-up caused by fire exclusion reaches thresholds that compromise resilience to fire.

Aim: Wildfire activity in recent years is notable not only for an expansion of total area burned but also for large, single-day fire spread events that pose challenges to ecological systems and human communities.

Previous attempts to identify the environmental factors associated with firefighter entrapments in the United States have suggested that there are several common denominators. Despite the widespread acceptance of the assumed commonalities, few studies have quantified how often entrapments actually meet these criteria.

Forest land managers rely on predictions of tree mortality generated from fire behavior models to identify stands for post-fire salvage and to design fuel reduction treatments that reduce mortality. A key challenge in improving the accuracy of these predictions is selecting appropriate wind and fuel moisture inputs.

There is an urgent need for next-generation smoke research and forecasting (SRF) systems to meet the challenges of the growing air quality, health and safety concerns associated with wildland fire emissions.

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.