Over the past 30 years, the cost of wildfire suppression and homes lost to wildfire in the US have increased dramatically, driven in part by the expansion of the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where buildings and wildland vegetation meet.
Following wildfire, mountainous areas of the western United States are susceptible to debris flow during intense rainfall. Convective storms that can generate debris flows in recently burned areas may occur during or immediately after the wildfire, leaving insufficient time for development and implementation of risk mitigation strategies.
Wildfire’s economic, ecological and social impacts are on the rise, fostering the realisation that business-as-usual fire management in the United States is not sustainable.
The interaction between grazing and fire influences ecosystems around the world. However, little is known about the influence of grazing on fire, in particular ignition and initial spread and how it varies by grazing management differences.
The growing frequency of large wildland fires has raised awareness of the ‘wildfire paradox’ and the ‘firefighting trap’ that are both rooted in the fire exclusion paradigm. However, a paradigm shift has been unfolding in the wildland fire community that seeks to restore fire ecology processes across broad landscapes.
Currently, limited research on large-fire suppression effectiveness suggests fire managers may over-allocate resources relative to values to be protected. Coupled with observations that weather may be more important than resource abundance to achieve control objectives, resource use may be driven more by risk aversion than efficiency.
Escape routes are essential components of wildland firefighter safety, providing pre-defined pathways to a safety zone. Among the many factors that affect travel rates along an escape route, landscape conditions such as slope, low-lying vegetation density, and ground surface roughness are particularly influential, and can be measured using airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data.
Most previous research has assessed the ability of the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) to portray fire activity at either single sites or on small spatial scales, despite it being a nation-wide system.
One crucial component of large fire response in the United States (US) is the sharing of wildland firefighting resources between regions: resources from regions experiencing low fire activity supplement resources in regions experiencing high fire activity.
Wildland firefighters must assess potential fire behaviour in order to develop appropriate strategies and tactics that will safely meet objectives. Fire danger indices integrate surface weather conditions to quantify potential variations in fire spread rates and intensities and therefore should closely relate to observed fire behaviour.