management

Background The PODs (potential operational delineations) concept is an adaptive framework for cross-boundary and collaborative land and fire management planning. Use of PODs is increasingly recognized as a best practice, and PODs are seeing growing interest from federal, state, local, tribal, and non-governmental organizations.

Background Adverse effects of wildfires can be mitigated within fuel treatments, but empirical evidence of their effectiveness across large areas is needed to guide design and implementation at the landscape level.

Background Wildland fires are fundamentally landscape phenomena, making it imperative to evaluate wildland fire strategic goals and fuel treatment effectiveness at large spatial and temporal scales. Outside of simulation models, there is limited information on how stand-level fuel treatments collectively contribute to broader landscape-level fuel management goals.

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.

Rapidly scaling up the use of prescribed fire is being promoted as an important pathway for reducing the growing damages of wildfire events in the United States, including limiting the health impacts from smoke emissions.

Background: Virtually every decision within wildland fire management includes substantial ethical dimensions. As pressures increase with ever-growing fires, it is becoming increasingly important to develop tools for assessing and acting on the values intrinsic to wildfire management.

Studies show that effective strategies to mitigate the risk of structural damage in wildfires include defensible spaces and home hardening. Structures in the western United States are especially at risk. Several jurisdictions have adopted codes that require implementation of these strategies.

Background: Prescribed burns have been increasingly utilised in forest management in the past few decades. However, their effectiveness in reducing the risk of destructive wildfires has been debated.

Humans have influenced global fire activity for millennia and will continue to do so into the future. Given the long-term interaction between humans and fire, we propose a collaborative research agenda linking archaeology and fire science that emphasizes the socioecological histories and consequences of anthropogenic fire in the development of fire management strategies today.

• Effective wildland fire response and suppression are critical for reducing the size of frequent and severe wildfires, thereby reducing the risk of post-fire conversion to invasive annual grass-dominated plant communities. • Wildland firefighter safety and strategic deployment of resources are paramount for timely initial attack to prevent incidents from escalating.