fire behavior

Fuel-treatments targeting shrubs and fire-prone exotic annual grasses (EAGs) are increasingly used to mitigate increased wildfire risks in arid and semiarid environments, and understanding their response to natural factors is needed for effective landscape management.

A deeper understanding of the influence of fine-scale fuel patterns on fire behavior is essential to the design of forest treatments that aim to reduce fire hazard, enhance structural complexity, and increase ecosystem function and resilience. Of particular relevance is the impact of horizontal and vertical forest structure on potential tree torching and large-tree mortality.

Background Maximizing the effectiveness of fuel treatments at landscape scales is a key research and management need given the inability to treat all areas at risk from wildfire. We synthesized information from case studies that documented the influence of fuel treatments on wildfire events.

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.