Firefighters are occasionally entrapped by wildfires. This paper presents an analysis of incidents in Australia over the last 40 years, and reveals the main contributing factors to those entrapments. The effect of a wind change on fire spread direction was found to be the principal cause of fatal fire entrapments.

An analysis of the National Fire Danger Rating System for the conterminous US (2006–13). Fire danger indices are correlated with measures of fire activity in order to identify spatial patterns and discrepancies across the US and identify different aspects of wildfire activity along several fire danger spectrums.

This study provides information on how post-fire surface fuel loadings change within the first 9 years after forest wildfires in dry conifer and hardwood forests of California. Differences in post-fire surface fuel dynamics among fire severity classes – low, moderate and high – are identified.

In this study, we assess soil organic layer (SOL) combustion in the Taiga Plains and Taiga Shield ecozones of the Northwest Territories, Canada, within the unprecedentedly large area burned by fires in 2014. We provide models and calibrations that should allow future research to more accurately estimate SOL burn depth in black spruce and jack pine boreal forests.

This proof-of-concept experiment uses distributed temperature sensing (DTS) to measure soil temperatures during a managed fire. Using off-the-shelf 242-μm diameter fibre, we were able to collect temperature data every 20 s over a 5.5-h period at 1243 locations along 316 m length of fibre with a spatial resolution of 60 cm.