Mechanical fuel treatments are a common pre-fire strategy for reducing wildfire hazard that alters fuel structure by converting live canopy fuels to a compacted layer of dead surface fuels. Current knowledge concerning their effectiveness, however, comes primarily from forest-dominated ecosystems.

Altered fuel conditions coupled with changing climate have disrupted fire regimes of forests historically characterised by high-frequency and low-to-moderate-severity fire. Managers use fuel treatments to abate undesirable fire behaviour and effects.

In this study, WRF-Sfire is coupled with WRF-Chem to construct WRFSC, an integrated forecast system for wildfire behaviour and smoke prediction. WRF-Sfire directly predicts wildfire spread, plume and plume-top heights, providing comprehensive meteorology and fire emissions to chemical transport model WRF-Chem, eliminating the need for an external plume-rise model.

Wildfire can affect soil hydraulic properties, often resulting in reduced infiltration. The magnitude of change in infiltration varies depending on the burn severity. Quantitative approaches to link burn severity with changes in infiltration are lacking.

The increasing extent of wildfires has prompted investigation into alternative fire management approaches to complement the traditional strategies of fire suppression and fuels manipulation. Wildfire prevention through ignition reduction is an approach with potential for success, but ignitions result from a variety of causes.

Current practices for measuring high heat flux in scenarios such as wildland forest fires use expensive, thermopile-based sensors, coupled with mathematical models based on a semi-infinite-length scale. Although these sensors are acceptable for experimental testing in laboratories, high error rates or the need for water cooling limits their applications in field experiments.

Wildfire-potential information products are designed to support decisions for prefire staging of movable wildfire suppression resources across geographic locations.

Convective instability can influence the behaviour of large wildfires. Because wildfires modify the temperature and moisture of air in their plumes, instability calculations using ambient conditions may not accurately represent convective potential for some fire plumes.

Over 1200 post-fire assessment and treatment implementation reports from four decades (1970s–2000s) of western US forest fires have been examined to identify decadal patterns in fire characteristics and the justifications and expenditures for the post-fire treatments.

Climate change effects on forested ecosystems worldwide include increases in drought-related mortality, changes to disturbance regimes and shifts in species distributions. Such climate-induced changes will alter the outcomes of current management strategies, complicating the selection of appropriate strategies to promote forest resilience.