About this Research Topic

Background

The severity of forest fires has increased substantially worldwide. This severity is prone to increase as a consequence of global change, e.g. climate and socioeconomic change. This suggests the need for the development of a coherent wildfire risk management strategy. This poses a challenge to forest researchers and managers as this strategy calls for methods and tools to help integrate forest and fire management planning activities that are often carried out independently of each other.

This Research Topic aims to bring together multidisciplinary expertise on wildfire management and forest ecosystem management to report state-of-the-art research that may help address this challenge. In this context, the Research Topic will focus on decision methods and tools that may support a) the characterization of wildfire regimes, b) the understanding of extreme wildfire events, c) the assessment of impacts of wildfire risk on the provision of ecosystem services, d) the enhancement of wildfire prevention, wildfire suppression, and post-fire restoration processes and e) the effectiveness of wildfire risk management strategies.

The Research Topic welcomes manuscripts that focus on:

• The characterization of current and future fire regimes, and its drivers
• The modeling of wildfire ignition, occurrence, and spread
• The development of wildfire behavior models and simulators
• The development of models and methods to help forest managers analyze impacts and tradeoffs between wildfire risk and a multitude of ecosystem services
• The development of wildfire prevention methods and decision support tools to design more resilient forested landscapes
• The optimization of wildfire suppression e.g. deployment and dispatch decisions
• The development of post-fire restoration strategies.

This Research Topic is associated with the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO Unit 4.04.04 - Sustainable Forest Management Scheduling). Authors are encouraged to present their work at the 19th Symposium on Systems Analysis in Forest Resources (SSAFR 2021) to be held in Estes Park, Colorado on August 8-11, 2021.

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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