Smouldering peat fires can survive underground for months, and may re-emerge and start a flame above ground when the dry and hot season arrives. This work demonstrates that the resurfacing of underground peat fire can ignite a flame on the surface litter layer and increase wildfire hazards. Photograph by Yichao Zhang et al.

Fire frequency is increasing with climate change in south-eastern Australia. We predicted that hollow-bearing trees will decline in forests where frequent fires co-occur with high rates at which trees collapse or are removed (e.g. due to frequent planned burns or timber harvesting) and/or where there are not a sufficient number of suitable mature trees in which new hollows can be excavated by fire (e.g. where tree regeneration is inhibited).

Burn severity is critical to understand fire dynamics. We mapped and modelled burn severity as a function of biophysical variables. Low severity was rare and occurred in small fires during cool and wet summer conditions in areas with sparser fuels or in more productive environments with discontinuous wet fuels.

This work used high frequency satellite derived wildfire properties to improve short-term (0–6 h) forecasts of smoke plumes. Results show that ingesting high frequency data significantly improves wildfire smoke forecasts compared to current operational systems.

This paper presents a cellular automaton to simulate multidimensional spread of smouldering peat with horizontally varying moisture. The model accurately predicted laboratory experiments (below 20% error) on the spread of smouldering under non-uniform moisture conditions and reproduced complex phenomena such as diagonal spread and encirclement of wet peat.