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’.
Priority research directions for wildfire science: views from a historically fire-prone and an emerging fire-prone country
K. Little,Rayanne Vitali,Claire M. Belcher,N. Kettridge,Adam F A Pellegrini,Adriana E. S. Ford,Alistair M. S. Smith,Andy Elliott,A. Voulgarakis,C. Stoof,Crystal A. Kolden,Dylan W. Schwilk,Eric B Kennedy,Fiona E. Newman Thacker,Gail R Millin-Chalabi,Gareth D. Clay,J. I. Morison,Jessica L. McCarty,K. Ivison,Kevin Tansey,Kimberley J. Simpson,Matthew W. Jones,M. Mack,P. Fulé,Rob Gazzard,S. Harrison,S. New,S. Page,Tilly E. Hall,Tim Brown,W. M. Jolly,Stefan H. Doerr
Published 2025 in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
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- Publication year
2025
- Venue
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
- Publication date
2025-04-01
- Fields of study
Geography, Medicine, Environmental Science
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar, PubMed
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