During periods of heightened wildland fire activity in the United States, multiagency coordinating groups must prioritize among multiple on-going fires to allocate scarce suppression resources. While many studies have explored factors that influence wildfire suppression expenditures and personnel allocation, understanding the specific factors that affect daily wildfire prioritization has remained unexplored. In this study, we first examine wildfire reporting and ranking processes across different regions of the United States to provide insight into criteria used for fire ranking. We then focus on examining the 12 criteria used for ranking fires daily by California's multiagency coordination group. We developed a computer program to replicate the California prioritization process and found that fire rankings generated by this program align well with the historical rankings, indicating close adherence of California's fire managers to their ranking rules. A correlation analysis revealed weak correlations among the 12 criteria, suggesting that no criterion should serve as a proxy for another during fire priority evaluations. We further applied a Random Forest machine learning model, which identified threats and damage to structures, fire size, and evacuations as the most impactful criteria in determining fire priority. Our findings can benefit wildfire decision makers by providing clear insights into the existing wildfire priority assessment process, so that adjustments to the process can be made for better management outcomes. Policymakers can also leverage these insights to develop evidence-based fire management policies, regulations, and practices that promote more efficient responses to fire risks while fostering greater public trust in fire management efforts.

In many fire-prone landscapes, protecting ecological values is an important objective of wildfire management. Here, we develop a mixed integer programming model for managing a network of linear fuel breaks to minimize wildfire impacts on the sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) core habitats in the northern Great Basin. The model uses simulated wildfires for 20,000 fire seasons, calibrated to historical fire occurrence data from 2006 to 2020. It coordinates treated fuel breaks to create opportunities to contain each simulated fire. Multiple treatment options with fuel break widths of 30 to 122 m are examined to facilitate effective suppression and prevent breaching by fires with flame lengths between 0.6 and 2.4 m. Both fires' burned areas and fuel breaks' treatment areas cause direct losses to the sagebrush core habitats. Our model was tested by constraining the direct habitat loss from treatments to within 0 to 8910 ha, repressing two extreme scenarios with no fuel break treatment or treating all fuel breaks at 122-m width. Model results highlight the importance of treating linear fuel breaks in the northern Great Basin, which can reduce the expected core habitat loss to wildfires by up to 38 % compared to the no-treatment scenario. More extensive treatment would cause diminishing returns, with no further reduction to core habitat loss to wildfires once treatment-related habitat loss exceeds 5346 ha. Our further analyses of the spatial fuel break layout solutions and their tradeoffs offer region-specific insights to support decision making. However, the model formulation is flexible for customizations to support broader applications in other fire-prone landscapes with different wildfire management objectives and requirements.

The escalation of wildfires in the USA, coupled with rising firefighting costs and decreasing workforce capacity, underscores the critical need to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of containment measures. However, the existing spatial data that records the locations and types of containment measures and wildfire perimeters contains numerous errors and redundancies. This paper presents a comprehensive fireline Quality Assurance and Quality Control dataset developed from the wildland firefighting operations data reported in the National Interagency Fire Center National Incident Feature Service. This improved dataset contains reliable spatial locations for fireline built during suppression operations, the associated verified fire perimeters, and identifies where containment was success or failure for fires greater than 1000 acres from 2017–2024. The improved final dataset represents critical information that was previously unavailable for assessing the success of fireline operations and incident management resource-use efficiency. The lessons learned from analyses utilizing this dataset are critical for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the United States wildfire management system.

This study utilizes Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) data sourced by the OpenSky Network to curate a dataset aimed at enhancing the precision of aerial suppressant drop predictions in wildland firefighting. By amalgamating ADS-B data with Automated Telemetry Unit (ATU) drop information, this research constructs a reliable base for analyzing the spatial aspects of aerial firefighting operations. Using sequential machine learning models, specifically Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and 1D Convolutional Neural Networks (1DCNN), the study interprets complex flight dynamics to predict drop locations. The dataset, covering 2017 to 2023, is labeled and segmented to reflect accurate suppressant release events, facilitating the distinction between drop and non-drop activities in fixed-wing aircraft. The LSTM model demonstrated strong predictive performance with an F1 score of 0.922, effectively identifying suppressant drop events with high accuracy. This model’s reliable predictions can significantly improve situational awareness in real-time aerial firefighting operations, enabling more informed decision-making and better coordination of resources during wildfire events.

This paper presents a unique 15-year dataset of Incident Management Situation Reports (IMSR), which document daily wildland fire situations across ten geographical regions in the United States. The IMSR dataset includes summaries for each reported day on national and regional wildfire activities, wildfire-specific activities, and committed fire suppression resources (i.e., personnel and equipment). This dataset is distinct from other wildfire data sources as it provides daily information on national fire suppression resource utilization, national and regional preparedness levels, and management priority for each region and fire. We developed an open-source Java program, IMSR-Tool, to process 3,124 IMSR reports available from 2007 to 2021 to generate this structured IMSR dataset, which can be updated when future reports become available. The dataset presented here and its future extension enable researchers and practitioners to study historical wildfire activity and resource use across regions and time, examine fire management perceptions, evaluate strategies for fire prioritization and fire resource allocation, and exploit other broader usage to improve wildfire management and response in the United States.

We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We constructed test cases for Southern California of the United States to understand model outcomes across a wide range of fire and fuel management scenarios. Results suggest optimal fuel treatment layouts within the Southern California’s fuel break network responding to various model assumptions, which offer insights for regional fuel break planning. Comparative tests between the proposed optimization model and a rule-based simulation approach indicate that the optimization model can provide significantly better solutions within reasonable solving times, highlighting its potential to support fuel break management and planning decisions.

Pre-fire mitigation efforts that include the installation and maintenance of fuel breaks are integral to wildfire suppression in Southern California. Fuel breaks alter fire behavior and assist in fire suppression at strategic locations on the landscape. However, the combined effectiveness of fuel breaks and wildfire suppression is not well studied. Using daily firefighting personnel to proxy the quantity and diversity of potential fire suppression operations (i.e., operational complexity), we examined 15 wildfires from 2017 to 2020 in the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino, and Cleveland National Forests to assess how weather and site-specific fuel break characteristics influenced wildfire containment when leveraged during suppression operations. After removing effects of fuel treatments, wildfire and aerial firefighting, we estimated that expanding fuel break width in grass-dominant systems from 10 to 100 m increased the average success rate against a heading fire from 31 % to 41 %. Likewise, recently cleared fuel breaks had higher success rates compared to poorly maintained fuel breaks in both grass (25 % to 45 %) and shrub systems (20 % to 45 %). Combined, grass and shrub systems exhibited an estimated success rate of 80 % under mild weather conditions (20th percentile) and 19 % under severe weather (80th percentile). Other significant determinants included forb and grass production, adjacent tree canopy cover and terrain. Consistent with complexity theory and previous suppression effectiveness research, our analysis showed signs of suppression effectiveness declining as firefighter personnel increased. Future work could better account for the role of suppression with improved data on firefighting resource types, actions, locations, and timing.

Background Current guidance for implementation of United States federal wildland fire policy charges agencies with restoring and maintaining fire-adapted ecosystems while limiting the extent of wildfires that threaten life and property, weighed against the risks posed to firefighters. These ostensibly conflicting goals can make it difficult to clearly communicate specific response objectives of a given incident. Inherent ambiguity can expose land management agencies, like the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS), to scrutiny when once remote, lightning-ignited wildfires burn across boundaries and result in damage. One such incident was the 2021 Tamarack Fire, ignited by lightning in a remote USFS wilderness area and ultimately burning 27,776 ha across multiple jurisdictions and destroying 25 structures. Intense sociopolitical interest developed around this incident, reigniting a “let burn” policy debate of the USFS despite this policy not formally existing. We provide a first approximation at quantifying the base rates of potentially consequently lightning-caused fires like the Tamarack Fire. We use multiple sources of fire-reporting data to characterize USFS fires from 2009 to 2020 by management-strategy to identify Tamarack Fire analogs. Within Incident Command System 209 (ICS-209) reports for fires originating on USFS lands, we identified 32 wildfires with similar key characteristics to the Tamarack Fire; nearly half ignited within wilderness areas. Results Initial strategies were driven by resource objectives for only six of the 32 wildfires; firefighter hazard mitigation was the primary driver of all others. No fire exhibited every characteristic of the Tamarack Fire. Analog fires accounted for a small percent (3.4%) of large (> 121 ha) USFS lightning-caused ignitions. These fires were responsible for 61.6% of structures destroyed and 25.8% of total personnel commitments of large lightning-caused USFS fires. Conclusions Lightning-ignited wildfires that could have resulted in sociopolitical controversy are rare, and those with strategies driven by resource objective are even rarer. More commonly, risks posed to firefighters from terrain, snags, or accessibility are factors driving strategy, even when fires ignite within wilderness areas. These results suggest that simple definitions of strategy such as those reported within the ICS-209 lack clarity and may increase sociopolitical pressure on the agency to continue aggressive fire exclusion strategies.

Dimensionality reduction simplifies high-dimensional data into a small number of representative patterns. One dimensionality reduction method, principal component analysis (PCA), often selects oscillatory or U-shaped patterns, even when such ...Principal component analysis (PCA) is a dimensionality reduction method that is known for being simple and easy to interpret. Principal components are often interpreted as low-dimensional patterns in high-dimensional space. However, this simple ...

BackgroundEstimating the factors affecting the probability of a wildfire reaching the wildland urban interface (WUI) can help managers make decisions to prevent WUI property loss. This study compiles data on fire progression, wind, landscape characteristics, and fireline built to estimate the probability of an active fire reaching nearby WUI blocks. We started by constructing funnel-shaped analysis zones between recorded fire perimeters and WUI blocks. We used zonal analysis to characterize landscape and fireline arrangement and then used a random forest modeling approach to quantify the probability of fire reaching the WUI blocks.ResultsWe found the probability of WUI exposure from an active fire had close relationships with several explanatory variables including wind gust velocity, suppression difficulty, control potential, fireline arrangement, road densities, WUI block sizes, and the distance between WUI and the fire's front. We found that the most important predictor variables influencing WUI exposure probability were gust, fireline arrangement, and distance from a fire ignition location to a WUI. We found that random forest models can achieve reasonable accuracy in estimating WUI fire exposure probabilities.ConclusionsFocal analyses and random forest models can be used to estimate WUI fire exposure probabilities in support of large fire suppression decisions at division to incident scales.

Fuel and wildfire management decisions related to fuel break construction, maintenance, and use in fire suppression suffer from limited information on fuel break success rates and drivers of effectiveness. We built a dataset of fuel break encounters with recent large wildfires in Southern California and their associated biophysical, suppression, weather, and fire behavior characteristics to develop statistical models of fuel break effectiveness with boosted regression. Our results suggest that the dominant influences on fuel break effectiveness are suppression, weather, and fire behavior. Variables related to fuel break placement, design, and maintenance were less important but aligned with manager expectations for higher success with wider and better maintained fuel breaks, and prior research findings that fuel break success increases with accessibility. Fuel breaks also held more often if burned by a wildfire during the previous decade, supporting the idea that fuel breaks may be most effective if combined with broader fuel reduction efforts.

A severe outbreak of wildfire across the US Pacific Coast during August 2020 led to persistent fire activity through the end of summer. In late September, Fire Weather Outlooks predicted higher than usual fire activity into the winter in parts of California, with concomitant elevated fire danger in the Southeastern US. To help inform the regional and national allocation of firefighting personnel and equipment, we developed visualizations of resource use during recent late season, high-demand analogs. Our visualizations provided an overview of the crew, engine, dozer, aerial resource, and incident management team usage by geographic area. While these visualizations afforded information that managers needed to support their decisions regarding resource allocation, they also revealed a potentially significant gap between resource demand and late-season availability that is only likely to increase over time due to lengthening fire seasons. This gap highlights the need for the increased assessment of suppression resource acquisition and allocation systems that, to date, have been poorly studied.

Background The PODs (potential operational delineations) concept is an adaptive framework for cross-boundary and collaborative land and fire management planning. Use of PODs is increasingly recognized as a best practice, and PODs are seeing growing interest from federal, state, local, tribal, and non-governmental organizations. Early evidence suggests PODs provide utility for planning, communication, coordination, prioritization, incident response strategy development, and fuels mitigation and forest restoration. Recent legislative action codifies the importance of PODs by devoting substantial financial resources to their expansion. The intent of this paper is to explore new horizons that would help land and fire management organizations better address risks and capitalize on opportunities. Specifically, we focus on how PODs are a natural platform for improvement related to two core elements of risk management: how we leverage preparation and foresight to better prepare for the future; and how we learn from the past to better understand and improve performance and its alignment with strategy. Results We organize our exploration of new horizons around three key areas, suggesting that PODs can enable climate-smart forest and fire management and planning, inform more agile and adaptive allocation of suppression resources, and enable risk-informed performance measurement. These efforts can be synergistic and self-reinforcing, and we argue that expanded application of PODs at local levels could enhance the performance of the broader wildland fire system. We provide rationales for each problem area and offer growth opportunities with attendant explanations and illustrations. Conclusions With commitment and careful effort, PODs can provide rich opportunities for innovation in both backward-looking evaluative and forward-looking anticipatory frameworks. In addition to continued improvement of core PODs elements, attention must be paid to being more inclusive and participatory in PODs planning, to building sufficient capacity to expand PODs applications in meaningful boundary spanning ways, to ensure their continuity and relevance over time through maintenance and updating, and to deliver necessary information to responders to inform the effective management of wildfires. Lastly, ongoing monitoring and evaluation of PODs and related initiatives is essential to support organizational learning and continual improvement.

Climate change and human development are impacting wildfires and the ways they are suppressed around the world. Many countries utilize aircraft that deliver water or chemicals to curtail fire spread, and the use of these aircraft is also changing along with the demands for increased suppression capacity. In the United States, Forest Service managers have adapted the national fleet of large airtankers to shifting fire demands with, among other actions, adoption of modern jet-powered aircraft. However, there is strong public sentiment that more airtankers are required to fully tackle the growing wildfire suppression problem. In this work, we utilize a novel and comprehensive dataset of automated airtanker drop records to characterize national-scale use from 2017 through 2021 for the federal large airtanker fleet. Through characterization of where, when, and on what fires drops occurred, we demonstrate that relatively few fires, compared to all fires that receive airtanker drops, account for a disproportionate amount of total airtanker use. We examine spatial and temporal characteristics of these outlier fires to describe potential patterns in demand pulses, and we use this information to discuss implications for potential fleet size decisions with respect to meeting future firefighting aircraft demand in a changing world.

Wildfire management has long been driven by a cadre of experienced professionals that rely heavily on their personal experience and judgement to determine the best available holding features to contain actively growing wildfires [...]

In the 2020 fire season, the fire management community developed and tested a wide range of new practices to meet challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. To better understand the effectiveness of different innovations and which should be considered for more permanent use, we surveyed Interagency Hotshot Crew (IHC) superintendents in January 2021. We focused on identifying innovations that, regardless of COVID-19, the IHCs would want to keep and why, as well as those that proved problematic. The survey focused on paperwork, briefings, and fire camp and incident command post setup. Results found clear benefits from many of the changes to operational efficiency and crew health and wellbeing; challenges were generally tied to logistical and communication issues. The results of this survey speak to the logistics of running large incident command operations and could be applied both outside the US and outside the field of wildland fire management. Study Implications: There may be meaningful benefits beyond mitigation of COVID-19 spread for continuing to use virtual paperwork, virtual briefings, and dispersed camp setups while supporting large fire suppression operations. Operational efficiency was seen as a clear benefit of many of these changes, with the often-mentioned advantage to a particular practice enabling crews to spend more time on the fireline. The new practices also appear to contribute to overall crew physical health. However, the benefits to crew health, efficiency, and effectiveness will need to be assessed against the increased logistical support required from incident management teams.

Wildfire is a natural phenomenon with substantial economic consequences, and its management is complex, dynamic, and rife with incentive problems. This article reviews the contribution of economics to our understanding of wildfire and highlights remaining knowledge gaps. We first summarize economic impacts to illustrate scale and trends. We then focus on wildfire management in three phases: mitigation before fires occur, response during fires, and response after fires. The literature highlights economic interdependencies and spillover effects across fire-prone landscapes as the source of economic inefficiencies and motivation for public institutional response. The literature illustrates the complexity of this problem with its myriad threads, including the trade-offs of living in fire-prone environments, the prospects for using controlled fire and mechanical fuel removal for reducing wildfire severity, the decision-making environment that firefighters face, and the economic consequences of wildfire smoke on health. Economics provides valuable insights, but fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Increasing wildfire activity, decreasing workforce capacity, and growing systemic strain may result in an interagency wildfire-response system less capable of protecting landscapes and communities. Further, increased workloads will likely increase hazards to fire personnel and amplify existing problems with recruitment and retention. In the face of elevated risks and degraded capacity, it is imperative that the wildfire-response system operate efficiently. Viable solutions are urgently needed that enable the system to do more with less and that manage not only for landscapes and communities but also the health and wellbeing of the fire personnel on whom the system relies. Achieving this will likely require rethinking how the interagency wildfire-response system can more adaptively and intelligently deploy fire personnel by leveraging enhanced logistics, operations, and proven fire analytics. Study Implications: As society grapples with increasing wildfire damage to landscapes and communities, the capacity of the interagency system in the USA designed to protect landscapes and communities from wildfires is degrading. A stressed system will be less capable of protecting life, property, and resources, and increased workloads will likely increase hazards to fire personnel and amplify existing problems with recruitment and retention. We argue that solutions are attainable through increased attention to performance and through more anticipatory, adaptive, and intelligent deployment of fire personnel across fire incidents and around the country.