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Federal land managers in the US can be informed with quantitative assessments of the social conditions of the populations affected by wildfires originating on their administered lands in order to incorporate and adapt their management strategy to achieve a more targeted prioritization of community wildfire protection investments. In addition, these assessments are valuable to socially vulnerable communities for quantifying their exposure to wildfires originating on adjacent land tenures. We assessed fire transmission patterns using fire behavior simulations to understand spatial variations across three diverse study areas (North-central Washington; Central California; and Northern New Mexico) to understand how different land tenures affect highly socially vulnerable populated places. Transboundary wildfire structure exposure was related to populations with limited adaptive capacity to absorb, recover and modify exposure to wildfires, estimated with the Social Vulnerability Index using US Census unit data (block groups). We found geographic heterogeneity in terms of land tenure composition and estimated fire exposure. Although high social vulnerability block groups covered small areas, they had high population and structure density and were disproportionately exposed per area burned by fire. Structure exposure originated primarily from three key land tenures (wildland-urban interface, private lands and national forests). Federal lands proportionately exposed, on an area basis, populated places with high social vulnerability, with fires ignited on Forest Service administered lands mostly affecting north-central Washington and northern New Mexico communities.

We report a fine-scale assessment of cross-boundary wildfire events for the western US. We used simulation modeling to quantify the extent of fire exchange among major federal, state, and private land tenures and mapped locations where fire ignitions can potentially affect populated places. We examined how parcel size affects wildfire transmission and partitioned the relative amounts of transmitted fire between human and natural ignitions. We estimated that 85 % of the total predicted wildfire activity, as measured by area burned, originates from four land tenures (Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, private, and state lands) and 63 % of the total amount results from natural versus human ignitions. On average, one-third of the area burned by predicted wildfires was nonlocal, meaning that the source ignition was on a different land tenure. Land tenures with smaller parcels tended to receive more incoming fire on a proportional basis, while the largest fires were generated from ignitions in national parks, national forests, and public and tribal lands. Among the 11 western states, the amount and pattern of cross-boundary fire varied substantially in terms of which land tenures were mostly exposed, by whom, and to what extent. We also found spatial variability in terms of community exposure among states, and more than half of the predicted structure exposure was caused by ignitions on private lands or within the wildland–urban interface areas. This study addressed gaps in existing wildfire risk assessments that do not explicitly consider cross-boundary fire transmission and do not identify the source of fire. The results can be used by state, federal, and local fire planning organizations to help improve risk mitigation programs.

Risk management typologies and their resulting archetypes can structure the many social and biophysical drivers of community wildfire risk into a set number of strategies to build community resilience. Existing typologies omit key factors that determine the scale and mechanism by which exposure from large wildfires occur. These factors are particularly important for land managing agencies like the US Forest Service, which must weigh community wildfire exposure against other management priorities. We analyze community wildfire exposure from national forests by associating conditions that affect exposure in the areas where wildfires ignite to conditions where exposure likely occurs. Linking source and exposure areas defines the scale at which cross-boundary exposure from large wildfires occurs and the scale at which mitigation actions need to be planned. We find that the vast majority of wildfire exposure from national forests is concentrated among a fraction of communities that are geographically clustered in discrete pockets. Among these communities, exposure varies primarily based on development patterns and vegetation gradients and secondarily based on social and ecological management constraints. We describe five community exposure archetypes along with their associated risk mitigation strategies. Only some archetypes have conditions that support hazardous fuels programs. Others have conditions where managing community exposure through vegetation management is unlikely to suffice. These archetypes reflect the diversity of development patterns, vegetation types, associated fuels, and management constraints that exist in the western US and provide a framework to guide public investments that improve management of wildfire risk within threatened communities and on the public lands that transmit fires to them.

Managing forests has been demonstrated to be an efficient strategy for fragmenting fuels and for reducing fire spread rates and severity. However, large-scale analyses to examine operational aspects of implementing different forest management scenarios to meet fire governance objectives are nonexistent for many Mediterranean countries. In this study we described an optimization framework to build forest management scenarios that leverages fire simulation, forest management, and tradeoff analyses for forest areas in Macedonia, Greece. We demonstrated the framework to evaluate five forest management priorities aimed at (1) protection of developed areas, (2) optimized commercial timber harvests, (3) protection of ecosystem services, (4) fire resilience, and (5) reducing suppression difficulty. Results revealed that by managing approximately 33,000 ha across all lands in different allocations of 100 projects, the area that accounted for 16% of the wildfire exposure to developed areas was treated while harvesting 2.5% of total wood volume. The treatments also reduced fuels on the area that are responsible for 3% of the potential fire impacts to sites with important ecosystem services, while suppression difficulty and wildfire transmission to protected areas attainment was 4.5% and 16%, respectively. We also tested the performance of multiple forest district management priorities when applying a proposed four-year fuel treatment plan that targeted achieving high levels of attainment by treating less area but strategically selected lands. Sharp management tradeoffs were observed among all management priorities, especially for harvest production compared with suppression difficulty, the protection of developed areas, and wildfire exposure to protected areas.

Adapting to the growing frequency of catastrophic wildfires in Greece and mitigating their effects is a complex socio-ecological problem. We used an online survey to query more than 100 engaged stakeholders who can potentially influence possible legislation and fire management organizational reform, emphasizing civil protection agencies and research entities. We focused the questionnaire on the importance of different wildfire effects to understand which were considered negative or unacceptable, indifferent, or positive. For fire prevention, we examined the range of acceptance and views on fuel management and fire use activities that are limited in extent or not allowed in Greece. We also examined the beliefs regarding ignition causes and responsibility, in addition to how different policies might reduce wildfire-related problems. The results revealed an emphasis on reforming wildfire management policies to deal with the way society and agencies function and interact, and mitigate the influence of climate change in wildfire frequency and behavior. In addition, respondents had a negative stance towards allowing wildfires to burn for resource objectives and a strong belief that arsonists are behind most ignitions. They also believe the lack of a national cadaster system is a major source of wildfire-related problems. The results indicate little support for fuel treatments, but increased acceptance for the legalization of fire use during firefighting (backfires). This study summarizes current wildfire perceptions in Greece and identifies opportunities and barriers to changes in wildfire governance to improve risk management programs and guide post-fire management and mitigation.

Large-scale wildfires have become more frequent in Greece and coupled with the country&rsquo, s limited economic resources, investments in both pre-fire planning and post-fire rehabilitation for most affected areas are not feasible. From the perspective of forest and fire management agencies, the severity and importance of fire effects are evaluated based only on total area burned, while from a societal standpoint, by the number of fatalities and destroyed houses. A holistic approach to rank wildfires with an inclusive assessment of all their effects is missing. We developed a new evaluation and ranking index based on expert judgment, the study of 50 large-scale fire events in Greece and a detailed review of the literature, to develop a set of categories and criteria to assess ecological and socioeconomic effects of wildfires. The Fire Inventory and Ranking of Effects (FIRE) Index provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use semi-numeric framework that combines scores from seven fire effects categories and 56 criteria through a user-friendly web-platform. The seven categories include fire effects on landscape and vegetation, general environmental impacts, regeneration potential and vegetation recovery, casualties and fatalities, destruction and damages to infrastructure, economic losses, and firefighting and wildfire suppression. Each of the 56 criteria within these categories describes a different anticipated fire effect. The magnitude of each fire effect criterion is estimated by predefined ranked choices by one or more persons/assessors in a multi-level evaluation procedure. We apply the FIRE Index assessment to a significant 5900-ha wildfire that occurred in 2011 in northern Greece, including a sensitivity analysis of how different category weights impact the final index score. More diverse metrics to assess wildfire effects will help address the complex social and biophysical dimensions of the wildfire governance challenge and help guide pre- and post-fire management actions.

In this study, we share an approach to locate and map forest management units with high accuracy and with relatively rapid turnaround. Our study area consists of private, state, and federal land holdings that cover four counties in North-Central Washington, USA (Kittitas, Okanogan, Chelan and Douglas). This area has a rich history of landscape change caused by frequent wildfires, insect attacks, disease outbreaks, and forest management practices, which is only partially documented across ownerships in an inconsistent fashion. To consistently quantify forest management activities for the entire study area, we leveraged Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, LANDFIRE existing vegetation types and disturbances, monitoring trends in burn severity fire perimeters, and Landsat 8 Burned Area products. Within our methodology, Sentinel-2 images were collected and transformed to orthogonal land cover change difference and ratio metrics using principal component analyses. In addition, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and the Relativized Burn Ratio index were estimated. These variables were used as predictors in Random Forests machine learning classification models. Known locations of forest treatment units were used to create samples to train the Random Forests models to estimate where changes in forest structure occurred between the years of 2016 and 2019. We visually inspected each derived polygon to manually assign one treatment class, either clearcut or thinning. Landsat 8 Burned Area products were used to derive prescribed fire units for the same period. The bulk of analyses were performed using the RMRS Raster Utility toolbar that facilitated spatial, statistical, and machine learning tools, while significantly reducing the required processing time and storage space associated with analyzing these large datasets. The results were combined with existing LANDFIRE vegetation disturbance and forest treatment data to create a 21-year dataset (1999&ndash, 2019) for the study area.

We assessed transboundary wildfire exposure among federal, state, and private lands and 447 communities in the state of Arizona, southwestern United States. The study quantified the relative magnitude of transboundary (incoming, outgoing) versus nontransboundary (i.e., self-burning) wildfire exposure based on land tenure or community of the simulated ignition and the resulting fire perimeter. We developed and described several new metrics to quantify and map transboundary exposure. We found that incoming transboundary fire accounted for 37% of the total area burned on large parcels of federal and state lands, whereas 63% of the area burned was burned by ignitions within the parcel. However, substantial parcel to parcel variation was observed for all land tenures for all metrics. We found that incoming transboundary fire accounted for 66% of the total area burned within communities versus 34% of the area burned by self-burning ignitions. Of the total area burned within communities, private lands contributed the largest proportion (36.7%), followed by national forests (19.5%), and state lands (15.4%). On average seven land tenures contributed wildfire to individual communities. Annual wildfire exposure to structures was highest for wildfires ignited on state and national forest land, followed by tribal, private, and BLM. We mapped community firesheds, that is, the area where ignitions can spawn fires that can burn into communities, and estimated that they covered 7.7 million ha, or 26% of the state of Arizona. Our methods address gaps in existing wildfire risk assessments, and their implementation can help reduce fragmentation in governance systems and inefficiencies in risk planning.

The development of comprehensive fire management and risk assessment strategies is of prominent concern in Southern Europe, due to the expanding scale of wildfire risk. In this work, we applied simulation modeling to analyze fine-scale (100-m resolution) wildfire exposure and risk transmission in the 24,000 km2 island of Sardinia (Italy). Sardinia contains a variety of ecological, cultural, anthropic and touristic resources that each summer are threatened by wildfires, and represents well the Mediterranean Basin environments and conditions. Wildfire simulations based on the minimum travel time algorithm were used to characterize wildfire exposure and risk transmission in terms of annual burn probability, flame length, structures exposed and type and amount of transmission. We focused on the historical conditions associated with large (>50 ha) and very large (>200 ha) wildfires that occurred in Sardinia in the period 1998–2016, and combined outputs from wildfire simulation modeling with land uses, building footprint locations, weather, and historical ignition data. The outputs were summarized for weather zones, main wind scenarios and land uses. Our study characterized spatial variations in wildfire spread, exposure and risk transmission among and within weather zones and the main winds associated with large events. This work provides a novel quantitative approach to inform wildfire risk management and planning in Mediterranean areas. The proposed methodology can serve as reference for wildfire risk assessment and can be replicated elsewhere. Findings can be used to better understand the spatial dynamics and patterns of wildfire risk and evaluate expected wildfire behavior or transmission potential in Sardinia and neighboring regions.

A solution to the growing problem of catastrophic wildfires in Greece will require a more holistic fuel management strategy that focuses more broadly on landscape fire behavior and risk in relation to suppression tactics and ignition prevention. Current fire protection planning is either non-existent or narrowly focused on reducing fuels in proximity to roads and communities where ignitions are most likely. A more effective strategy would expand the treatment footprint to landscape scales to reduce fire intensity and increase the likelihood of safe and efficient suppression activities. However, expanding fuels treatment programs on Greek landscapes that are highly fragmented in terms of land use and vegetation requires: (1) a better understanding of how diverse land cover types contribute to fire spread and intensity, and (2) case studies, both simulated and empirical, that demonstrate how landscape fuel management strategies can achieve desired outcomes in terms of fire behavior. In this study, we used Lesvos Island, Greece as a study area to characterize how different land cover types and land uses contribute to fire exposure and used wildfire simulation methods to understand how fire spreads among parcels of forests, developed areas, and other land cover types (shrublands, agricultural areas, and grasslands) as a way to identify fire source&ndash, sink relationships. We then simulated a spatially coordinated fuel management program that targeted the fire prone conifer forests that generally burn under the highest intensity. The treatment effects were measured in terms of post-treatment fire behavior and transmission. The results demonstrated an optimized method for fuel management planning that accounts for the connectivity of wildfire among different land types. The results also identified the scale of risk and the limitations of relying on small scattered fuel treatment units to manage long-term wildfire risk.

We describe a Web-GIS wildfire prevention and management platform (AEGIS) developed as an integrated and easy-to-use decision support tool to manage wildland fire hazards in Greece (http://aegis.aegean.gr). The AEGIS platform assists with early fire warning, fire planning, fire control and coordination of firefighting forces by providing online access to information that is essential for wildfire management. The system uses a number of spatial and non-spatial data sources to support key system functionalities. Land use/land cover maps were produced by combining field inventory data with high-resolution multispectral satellite images (RapidEye). These data support wildfire simulation tools that allow the users to examine potential fire behavior and hazard with the Minimum Travel Time fire spread algorithm. End-users provide a minimum number of inputs such as fire duration, ignition point and weather information to conduct a fire simulation. AEGIS offers three types of simulations, i.e., single-fire propagation, point-scale calculation of potential fire behavior, and burn probability analysis, similar to the FlamMap fire behavior modeling software. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) were utilized for wildfire ignition risk assessment based on various parameters, training methods, activation functions, pre-processing methods and network structures. The combination of ANNs and expected burned area maps are used to generate integrated output map of fire hazard prediction. The system also incorporates weather information obtained from remote automatic weather stations and weather forecast maps. The system and associated computation algorithms leverage parallel processing techniques (i.e., High Performance Computing and Cloud Computing) that ensure computational power required for real-time application. All AEGIS functionalities are accessible to authorized end-users through a web-based graphical user interface. An innovative smartphone application, AEGIS App, also provides mobile access to the web-based version of the system.

Predicting wildfire disasters presents a major challenge to the field of risk science, especially when fires propagate long distances through diverse fuel types and complex terrain. A good example is in the western US where large tracts of public lands routinely experience large fires that spread from remote wildlands into developed areas and cause structure loss and fatalities. In this paper we provide the first comprehensive assessment of where public wildlands potentially contribute wildfire exposure to communities in the 11 western US states. We used simulation modeling to map and characterize the composition of the source landscapes (firesheds) and recipient communities in terms of fuels, fire behavior and forest management suitability. The information was used to build a prototype investment prioritization framework that targets highly exposed communities where forest and fuel management activities are feasible. We found that simulated wildfires ignited on national forests can potentially affect about half of the communities in the western US (2560 out of 5118), with 90% of exposure affecting the top 20% of the communities (n = 516). Firesheds within national forests, defined as areas that have the potential to expose communities to fire, were estimated at 35 million ha (62% of the total national forest area), and were almost three times larger than the affected community lands. Large contiguous areas of wildfire transmission were evident on a number of national forests. Only 22% of the fireshed area is forested, fire-adapted, and lies within land management designations that allow mechanical fuels management. The methods demonstrate how cross-boundary exposure can be factored into prioritizing federal investments in hazardous fuels reduction on national forests in concert with community protection measures. The results can also help scale wildfire governance systems to match the geography of risk from large wildfire events, which augments existing assessments that do not explicitly identify the source of risk to communities.