Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations, or ‘PODs’, are a collaborative planning approach for proactively identifying locations where wildfires potentially could be contained. We found PODs may facilitate communication across actors and jurisdictions and consideration of a greater range of response options. Effective use of PODs will require dedicated leadership and capacity.

Ensembles of physics-based fire model simulations demonstrate that the fidelity and spatial heterogeneity of fuel influenced simulated fire behaviour. Increased variance of fuel density resulted in decreased fire behaviour metrics compared with a homogenous fuel representation. However, large forest gaps overcame the effect of increased variance of fuel density as fire behaviour metrics rebounded.

We analysed how species composition and climate affect fuel moisture content in Mediterranean plant species. We found that, on average, high diversity decreases fuel moisture in wet sites, but increases fuel moisture in dry sites. As fuel moisture affects combustibility, our results suggest a link between species diversity and fire risk.

Using rate of fire spread data from experiments in grass fuels, we comment on the simulation results obtained by Moinuddin et al. (2018). In contrast with these simulations results, available empirical data shows grass height to have a direct (positive) effect on rate of fire spread.

We confirmed that two modes of fire propagation (wind-driven and plume-driven) exist as found in various empirical evidence, including CSIRO data. Many of the apparent discrepancies can be reconciled through the proper observance of the different parametric regimes that are represented in the various experimental and simulation results.