There is a growing professional and public perception that ‘extreme’ wildland fires are becoming more common due to changing climatic conditions. This concern is heightened in the wildland–urban interface where social and ecological effects converge.
There is currently insufficient information in the United States about residents’ planned evacuation actions during wildfire events, including any intent to remain at or near home during fire events. This is incompatible with growing evidence that select populations at risk from wildfire are considering alternatives to evacuation.
Recent years have seen growing interest within the United States fire management community in exploring alternatives to the standard approach of evacuating entire populations that are threatened by a wildfire.
This article reviews social science research on Indigenous wildfire management in Australia, Canada and the United States after the year 2000 and explores future research needs in the field.
Wildfire activity in the United States incurs substantial costs and losses, and presents challenges to federal, state, tribal and local agencies that have responsibility for wildfire management. Beyond the potential socioeconomic and ecological losses, and the monetary costs to taxpayers due to suppression, wildfire management is a dangerous occupation.
Current wildland firefighter safety zone guidelines are based on studies that assume flat terrain, radiant heating, finite flame width, constant flame temperature and high flame emissivity. Firefighter entrapments and injuries occur across a broad range of vegetation, terrain and atmospheric conditions generally when they are within two flame heights of the fire.
Increased wildfire activity (e.g. number of starts, area burned, fire behaviour) across the western United States in recent decades has heightened interest in resolving climate–fire relationships.
High temporal resolution information on burnt area is needed to improve fire behaviour and emissions models. We used the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomaly and active fire product (MO(Y)D14) as input to a kriging interpolation to derive continuous maps of the timing of burnt area for 16 large wildland fires.
Seeding following high-severity wildfires is motivated by the goals of increasing vegetative cover and decreasing bare soil in order to minimise soil erosion and exotic plant invasions. We compared the ground cover and vegetation response of seeded versus non-seeded areas located in the Warm Fire in northern Arizona, where post-fire seeding treatments with Italian ryegrass (Lolium perenne spp.
In arid and semi-arid landscapes around the world, wildfire plays a key role in maintaining species diversity. Dominant plant associations may depend upon particular fire regime characteristics for their persistence.