Celebrating 30 Years of Wildland Fire Science Publication
This review synthesises and discusses studies since 2006 that estimated the economic health cost from wildfire smoke exposure. We specifically focus on the functioning of the free tool BenMAP-CE from the Environmental Protection Agency that can be used to assess health cost from wildfires.
Wildland fire scientists and land managers working in fire-prone areas require spatial estimates of wildland fire potential. A method called burn probability modelling was developed to fulfil this need. This review describes this approach and provides an overview of its applications in wildland fire research, risk analysis and land management.
A review and synthesis of existing data, research and historical investigations related to wildland firefighter entrapments in the United States are presented. Specific topics discussed include a critique of the data collection and storage procedures following entrapments, historical and geographical trends and a summary of research needs.
Fire behaviour and smoke models provide smoke information for managers to assess fire impacts and develop mitigation plans. This review paper describes the modelling efforts performed to understand modelling issues and data needs. The results are used to support the design of field campaigns such as the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE), which conduct comprehensive measurements of fuels, fire behaviour, emission, smoke and weather, and the development of the next-generation smoke research and forecasting systems.
This paper reviews firefighters’ sleep during wildfire operations, the operational and environmental factors that impact on sleep, and how sleep affects health and safety. For fire agencies to support firefighting personnel, strategies are needed to improve and manage firefighters’ sleep, and reduce any adverse impacts on firefighters’ work.
This review shows that research investigating emissions and haze evolved from smouldering peat fires is limited. Tropical peat fires exhibit higher emission factors for carbon gas species than boreal and temperate peat fires. Large uncertainties exist in both emission factors and understanding of combustion regimes.
This review article analyses the development of human-caused wildfire occurrence models from 1954 to 2016, and recommends relevant factors, models and applications for the two temporal scales (short-term and long-term) used in the majority of previous works.
We review challenges to determining and demonstrating efficiency of strategic approaches to managing low-probability, high-consequence large fire events. Key knowledge gaps relate to quantifying the consequences of fire and how they may change under alternative suppression strategies.
Wildfires can significantly degrade air quality and cause a health hazard to exposed human populations. The amount and type of pollutants in wildfire smoke are strongly influenced by the fuel characteristics and the burning conditions. Public health response to wildfire smoke relies on knowledge of the main pollutants present in the smoke, the intensity and duration of exposure and the dispersion of the smoke plume.
An efficient suppression response has been demonstrated to reduce the size and subsequent impacts of wildfires. This has stimulated the development of fire suppression models that form part of decision support systems. We review the historic development of such models, assess the state of the art and provide perspectives on future research.
We highlight challenges in effective fire and burn severity assessments in the field and using remote sensing and simulation models. We suggest that instead of collapsing interacting fire effects into a single severity index, the direct effects of fire be measured and integrated into severity index keys.
We conducted a systematic review of the effect of fire on 122 small mammal species. We found that survey design and statistical analysis was often inadequate and therefore limited inference. The overall effect size between unburnt and burnt sites was relatively small but was influenced by body size and habitat preference of species.
This article reviews social science research on Indigenous wildfire management in Australia, Canada and the United States after the year 2000 and explores future research needs in the field.
Literature was reviewed about the effects of prescribed burning on surface runoff and erosion, with particular emphasis on the influence of fire regime characteristics. Two future research directions are recommended: (1) process-based studies to understand the factors controlling surface runoff and erosion; and (2) landscape-scale surveys to quantify large erosion events.
