Costs of preventing and supressing wildfires in Victoria, Australia.

Land managers around the world are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate that the actions being used to moderate wildfire risk are effective and cost-efficient. However, little research to date has focused on determining cost-efficiency of management actions or identified the factors which increase the costs of performing such actions. Here, we aimed to identify the key drivers of cost for fuel management (prescribed burning, mulching, and slashing), fuel breaks, and suppression using data from the state of Victoria, Australia.

The fuel-climate-fire conundrum: How will fire regimes change in temperate eucalypt forests under climate change?

Fire regimes are changing across the globe in response to complex interactions between climate, fuel, and fire across space and time. Despite these complex interactions, research into predicting fire regime change is often unidimensional, typically focusing on direct relationships between fire activity and climate, increasing the chances of erroneous fire predictions that have ignored feedbacks with, for example, fuel loads and availability. Here, we quantify the direct and indirect role of climate on fire regime change in eucalypt dominated landscapes using a novel simulation approach that uses a landscape fire modelling framework to simulate fire regimes over decades to centuries.

Pathways of change: Predicting the effects of fire on flammability.

Impacts of wildfire on humans are increasing as urban populations continue to expand into fire prone landscapes. Effective fire risk management can only be achieved if we understand and quantify how ecosystems change in response to fire and how these changes affect flammability. However, there have been limited studies to this effect with the dominant paradigm being the assumption that recently burnt vegetation is less flammable than older vegetation.