Can wildland fire behavior really be predicted? That depends on how accurate you expect the prediction to be. The minute-by-minute movement of a fire will probably never be predictable- certainly not from weather conditions forecasted many hours before the fire. Nevertheless, practice and experienced judgment in assessing the fire environment, coupled with a systematic method of calculating fire behavior, yield surprisingly good results (Rothermel 1983). This is the third and final special issue of Fire Management Today in a series of issues devoted to the subject of wildland fire behavior. The first two issues contained 36 articles dealing with wildland fire behavior case studies and analyses published in Fire Management Today and its predecessors between 1937 and 2000. These two issues contained lead articles on various aspects of those subjects (Alexander and Thomas 2003a, 2003b). Not included in these two issues are two recent articles on fire behavior published in Fire Management Today (Brown 2002; Cornwall 2003). This issue is devoted to aids, guides, and knowledge-based protocols involved in predicting wildland fire behavior for safe and effective fire suppression (Alexander 2000). It includes 21 articles published from 1947 to 1998. A recent article by Weick (2002) that emphasizes the importance of human factors in the field of fire behavior forecasting could have easily been included.