Increased forest fire activity across the western continental United States (US) in recent decades has likely been enabled by a number of factors, including the legacy of fire suppression and human settlement, natural climate variability, and human-...

Fire Behavior Portal
The fire behavior topic page contains resources and activities related to the study and management of the direction, spread and intensity of wildland fire.
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Wildland Fire Library (firelibrary.org)
The Wildland Fire Library (firelibrary.org) is a collection of long-term assessments, fire progressions, fire behavior reports, and other documents and resources to support fire modeling and assessment of long-duration fires. Each file is tied to some event with a location, a start date, and background information. This site is operated by Rick Stratton and Jim Edmonds of the USFS National Office.
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Wildfires are complex adaptive systems, and have been hypothesized to exhibit scale-dependent transitions in the drivers of fire spread. Among other things, this makes the prediction of final fire size from conditions at the ignition difficult. We test...
Fuel load is a primary determinant of fire spread in Australian forests. In east Australian forests, litter and canopy fuel loads and hence fire hazard are thought to be highest at and beyond steady-state fuel loads 15-20 years post-fire. Current...
Computational simulations of wildfires require a model for the two-dimensional expansion of a fire perimeter. Although many expressions exist for the one-dimensional rate of spread of a fire front, there are currently no agreed mathematical expressions...
Mastication of shrubs and small trees to reduce fire hazard has become a widespread management practice, yet many aspects of the fire behaviour of these unique woody fuelbeds remain poorly understood. To examine the effects of fuelbed aging on fire...
The use of fire for traditional agriculture, animal husbandry and forestry is highly important to farmers in developing countries where this practice is continuously blamed as being the main cause of forest fires. That is the case in the Monarch...
From the text...'The specific questions we sought to address were (1) what is the magnitude of fire radiative power (FRP) attenuation due to increases in simulated tree canopy cover? And (2) does living but non-transpiring versus desiccated canopy...
Wildfire activity in boreal forests is projected to increase dramatically in response to anthropogenic climate change. By altering the spatial arrangement of fuels, land-cover configuration may interact with climate change to influence fire-regime...
Understanding how future climate periods influence fire behaviour is important for organizing fire suppression strategy and management . The meteorological factors are the most critical parameters affecting fire behaviour in natural landscapes; hence,...
Transboundary haze pollution as a result of indiscriminate land clearance by fire has significant health and economic impacts on member states of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN). Meanwhile the impact of the associated carbon...
Text of the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF) statement:
Climate change has already had significant consequences in the global wildfire reality, affecting citizens as well as the global wildland fire community. Many key issues of importance to the IAWF - including firefighter and civilian safety, fire management expenses, changing weather patterns, natural role of fire, fire regimes and ecosystem succession, as well as the wildland urban interface - all require recognition of the role of climate change.
Globally, we regularly see new reports about the “worst”, “largest”, “most expensive”, and “deadliest” fires and fire seasons. In 2019 and 2018, striking headlines read “Arctic on Fire” (Sweden, Russia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska), and the most expensive and largest fire years were recorded in 2018 in California and British Columbia, respectively, breaking the previous records set in 2017. The Camp Fire (CA, 2018), Attica Greece (2018), Black Saturday Australia (2009), and Portugal (2017) fires were all ranked amongst the top 11 deadliest fires in the last 100 years.
Under current climate change scenarios, fire regimes will change in terms of increases in burned area, severity, fire season length, frequency, and ignitions from lightning. Many parts of the world have already experienced an increase in record breaking temperatures and recurring droughts that have led to shifts in wildland fire. There is already evidence of climate-driven fire regime change in the Northern Hemisphere upper latitudes with fire risk increasing in non-traditional fire-prone countries. The consequences of human actions are here today, not in some distant future, and these are alarming and, most important, escalating.
The IAWF encourages all countries to emphasize increased international fire training and to implement easier cross-border sharing of professional fire management resources for suppression and prescribed fire opportunities. These will lessen the irrationally heavy burden any single country will have to carry to manage extreme fire seasons. Homes and communities must be better planned and built, so they are increasingly fire resistant and more adapted to natural disasters of all types. Health impacts of fires have long-term consequences, not only those that are immediate from the flames but also those from smoke and toxins, and these must be considered when planning and managing for future wildland fires. Wildfires and smoke do not recognize borders. As the global community tries to manage the new wildfire challenges, it is incumbent on everyone to prepare to support international neighbours in protecting lives and communities from fires and their impacts.
IAWF Vice-President Toddi Steelman recently said in Wildfire magazine (August 2019) that “Recent extreme weather events have catalysed public belief in, and concern about, climate change, and boosted public support for government actions to reduce its harmful impacts. This gives us a window of opportunity when conditions are right to make great strides on climate if we are strategic about it.” This window of opportunity requires people having the knowledge and political will to act now. Our global scientific community needs to publicly share knowledge learned about patterns of extreme wildland fire and weather, as well as how climate change is associated with these patterns. Our global fire management community needs to leverage its credibility to share its experiences about how climate change and its role in extreme weather is playing out in their day to day work environments. Connecting extreme weather events to real on-the-ground consequences can help more people understand how climate impacts are affecting us all.
No upcoming events.
In this FLN webinar, Jean Lorber will give a short presentation about new fire monitoring results; this will be followed by case studies of individual burn units, presented by the folks that burned them, to showcase a range of fire intensities and talk...
The Tactical Fire Remote Sensing Advisory Committee is a joint effort by NASA and USFS to advance use of earth observations in wildfire. The group meets twice each year to discuss the developments and results of ongoing investigations for new and...
Sponsor: Southwest Fire Science Consortium
Presenter: Stephanie Mueller, Northern Arizona University
Over the last 30 years, in woodland and forested ecosystems across the southwestern US, there has been an increasing trend in fire...
A lecture by Dr. Jon Keeley - US Geological Survey, Western Ecological Research Center, Sequoia Field Station, and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA
Part of the 2019 FERAL* Lecture Series Sponsored by the California Fire...
The Polar Research Board, in collaboration with the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, convened a workshop in December 2018 to discuss vegetation greening and browning in tundra and boreal...
Presented by the Alaska Fire Modeling and Analysis Committee.
The dates of this training are: April 29-May 10, 2019.
There is widespread recognition within conservation, restoration, and land management agencies across the state of the need to increase ecologically-based, landscape restoration. To do so...
FEATURED SPEAKER: Dr. Gerould Wilhelm Director of Research at the Conservation Research Institute and co-author of “Flora of the Chicago Region: A Floristic and Ecological Synthesis”
Pre-season climate and weather variables point to an especially active fire season this year for the Pacific Northwest. During this webinar, we’ll explore the factors that make up this outlook, define what a normal fire season looks like for the...
The dates of this training are: April 29-May 10, 2019.
There is widespread recognition within conservation, restoration, and land management agencies across the state of the need to increase ecologically-based, landscape restoration. To do so...