From introduction: 'Research on fire is often of an applied nature, addressing questions of how to manage landscapes for fire, how to determine fire danger, how to model fire behavior, fire impacts and post-fire succession (Martell 2001; Chuvieco 2003). This in part reflects the desire of the funding agencies to maximize the benefits from the large amounts of public money spent each year on fire management. There is an increasing body of fire research in the area of global change, for example studying the potential impacts of climate change altering fire regimes, the impact on the atmosphere in terms of emissions, radiative forcing and chemical composition and feedbacks to the surface (Scholes et al., 1996; Stocks et al., 1998; Govaerts et al., 2002).'