Learning from Wildfire Decision Support: large language model analysis of barriers to fire spread in a census of large wildfires in the United States (2011–2023)

Background Barriers are the landscape features that firefighters leverage to stop wildfire spread. In the United States, decision-makers discuss barrier availability in a framework called the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS). Aims This study analyzes WFDSS text from 6630 large wildfires and examines the barriers identified. Methods A large language model was trained and validated, then used to detect 13 different barriers. Burn scar and fuel treatment barriers were compared with their availability near each fire. Key results Decision-makers recognize barriers on most wildfires (75%) and explicitly state when they are not present. Roads (42% of incidents), burn scars (26%) and natural fuel variability (25%) are the most common barriers. There is a strong relationship between the amount of burned area and the probability that it is identified as a barrier. The relationship between fuel treatment barriers and their availability is weak, but fuel treatments are recognized as barriers at lower landscape thresholds than burn scars. Conclusions Prior wildfire yields more opportunities for stopping fire spread than fuel treatments. However, a smaller area must be treated than burned naturally before fire managers consider it a barrier. Implications This study helps direct policy towards expanding useful barriers.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  International journal of wildland fire

• Publication date

  2025-09-04

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1071/wf25051
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Prescribed fire, managed burning, and previous wildfires reduce the severity of a southwestern US gigafire

  2025cited by this paper
• The role of fuel treatments during incident management

  2025cited by this paper
• A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation

  2024cited by this paper
• Wildfire Management Strategy and Its Relation to Operational Risk

  2024cited by this paper
• Large language models and the perils of their hallucinations

  2023cited by this paper
• Shifting social-ecological fire regimes explain increasing structure loss from Western wildfires

  2023cited by this paper
• Fuel treatment effectiveness at the landscape scale: a systematic review of simulation studies comparing treatment scenarios in North America

  2023cited by this paper
• Autonomous chemical research with large language models

  2023cited by this paper
• A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions

  2023cited by this paper
• Ethical ChatGPT: Concerns, Challenges, and Commandments

  2023cited by this paper
• Factors Influencing Risk during Wildfires: Contrasting Divergent Regions in the US

  2022cited by this paper
• BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Mining

  2022cited by this paper
• A systematic review of empirical evidence for landscape-level fuel treatment effectiveness

  2022cited by this paper
• Simulating Potential Impacts of Fuel Treatments on Fire Behavior and Evacuation Time of the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California

  2022cited by this paper
• Patterns of wildfire risk in the United States from systematic operational risk assessments: how risk is characterised by land managers

  2021cited by this paper
• Generative Chemical Transformer: Neural Machine Learning of Molecular Geometric Structures from Chemical Language via Attention

  2021cited by this paper
• Evidence for widespread changes in the structure, composition, and fire regimes of western North American forests

  2021cited by this paper
• Manage fire regimes, not fires

  2021cited by this paper
• Warmer and Drier Fire Seasons Contribute to Increases in Area Burned at High Severity in Western US Forests From 1985 to 2017

  2020cited by this paper
• Record‐setting climate enabled the extraordinary 2020 fire season in the western United States

  2020cited by this paper
• Global Emergence of Anthropogenic Climate Change in Fire Weather Indices

  2019cited by this paper
• Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences

  2019cited by this paper
• Rapid growth of the US wildland-urban interface raises wildfire risk

  2018cited by this paper
• quanteda: An R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data

  2018cited by this paper
• Beyond Fuel Treatment Effectiveness: Characterizing Interactions between Fire and Treatments in the US

  2016cited by this paper
• Tamm Review: Are fuel treatments effective at achieving ecological and social objectives? A systematic review

  2016cited by this paper
• Wildland fire as a self-regulating mechanism: the role of previous burns and weather in limiting fire progression.

  2015cited by this paper
• Fuel accumulation and forest structure change following hazardous fuel reduction treatments throughout California

  2015cited by this paper
• The fire frequency‐severity relationship and the legacy of fire suppression in California forests

  2015cited by this paper
• Fuel treatments and landform modify landscape patterns of burn severity in an extreme fire event.

  2014cited by this paper
• Resistance of the boreal forest to high burn rates

  2014cited by this paper
• The global fire–productivity relationship

  2013cited by this paper
• Previous Fires Moderate Burn Severity of Subsequent Wildland Fires in Two Large Western US Wilderness Areas

  2013cited by this paper
• Interrater reliability: the kappa statistic

  2012cited by this paper
• Characterizing Fire-on-Fire Interactions in Three Large Wilderness Areas

  2012cited by this paper
• Developing the US Wildland Fire Decision Support System

  2011cited by this paper
• Fire treatment effects on vegetation structure, fuels, and potential fire severity in western U.S. forests.

  2009cited by this paper
• A Burning Story: The Role of Fire in the History of Life

  2009cited by this paper
• Interactions Among Wildland Fires in a Long-Established Sierra Nevada Natural Fire Area

  2009cited by this paper
• The National Fire and Fire Surrogate study: effects of fuel reduction methods on forest vegetation structure and fuels.

  2009cited by this paper
• A fuel treatment reduces fire severity and increases suppression efficiency in a mixed conifer forest

  2007cited by this paper
• A Project for Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity

  2007cited by this paper
• Simulation of long-term landscape-level fuel treatment effects on large wildfires

  2006cited by this paper
• FEDERAL FOREST‐FIRE POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES

  2005cited by this paper
• Design of Regular Landscape Fuel Treatment Patterns for Modifying Fire Growth and Behavior

  2001cited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.