Priority research directions for wildfire science: views from a historically fire-prone and an emerging fire-prone country

Abstract

Fire regimes are changing across the globe, with new wildfire behaviour phenomena and increasing impacts felt, especially in ecosystems without clear adaptations to wildfire. These trends pose significant challenges to the scientific community in understanding and communicating these changes and their implications, particularly where we lack underlying scientific evidence to inform decision-making. Here, we present a perspective on priority directions for wildfire science research-through the lens of academic and government wildfire scientists from a historically wildfire-prone (USA) and emerging wildfire-prone (UK) country. Key topic areas outlined during a series of workshops in 2023 were as follows: (A) understanding and predicting fire occurrence, fire behaviour and fire impacts; (B) increasing human and ecosystem resilience to fire; and (C) understanding the atmospheric and climate impacts of fire. Participants agreed on focused research questions that were seen as priority scientific research gaps. Fire behaviour was identified as a central connecting theme that would allow critical advances to be made across all topic areas. These findings provide one group of perspectives to feed into a more transdisciplinary outline of wildfire research priorities across the diversity of knowledge bases and perspectives that are critical in addressing wildfire research challenges under changing fire regimes.This article is part of the theme issue 'Novel fire regimes under climate changes and human influences: impacts, ecosystem responses and feedbacks'.

Keywords: fire behaviour; fire ecology; fire regimes; global change; research gaps; wildfire.

Figure 1.

Methods employed to identify the priority research questions.

Figure 2.

Overview of identified research questions and activities (right-hand side) within each topic area (left-hand side). Each topic area is relevant to all of the identified central themes: fire behaviour and fire danger, WUI/RUI, fire ecology and fire severity, and smoke and emissions.