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Aim: The aims were: (1) to identify the environmental drivers of interannual variation in wildfire extent and severity; (2) to examine temporal trends in climatic potential for large and severe wildfires; and (3) to assess whether environmental conditions experienced during the 2019–2020 mega‐fire season were anomalous. Location: South‐eastern Australia. Time period: 1953–2020. Major taxa studied: Temperate forests. Methods: We used satellite‐derived fire severity mapping from 1988 to 2020 to model the effects of drought, weather and fuels on the annual area burned and the proportion of the area burned that was impacted by high‐severity fire across four bioregions. Trends in wildfire extent and severity were then estimated from 1953 to 2020 using these derived models and gridded climate data to assess changes in climatic potential for large and severe wildfires. Estimates of wildfire extent and severity for the 2019–2020 fire season were then assessed against prior seasons (1953–2019). Results: Annual area burned was positively related to the severity of seasonal drought and frequency of fire weather conditions that promote substantial daily fire growth. Wildfire severity was elevated in years with severe fire weather and increased with increasing antecedent drought in years without severe fire weather. Fuels had a lesser effect on wildfire extent and severity than climate. Potential fire extent and severity have increased over time in response to an increased severity of drought and worsening fire weather conditions. Estimates of wildfire extent and severity during the 2019–2020 fire season approached the upper extreme within each bioregion, owing to widespread extreme climatic conditions. Main conclusions: The climatic potential for large and severe forest fires has increased across south‐eastern Australia since the 1950s, probably because of anthropogenic climate change. The magnitude and severity of the 2019–2020 fires reflected climatic conditions that are driving an increase in the size and severity of wildfires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. We estimated the relative roles of climate‐mediated changes as both direct effects on fire weather and indirect effects on fuel load and structure in a full factorial simulation experiment (present and future weather, present and future fuel) that included six climate ensemble members. We applied this simulation framework to predict changes in fire regimes across six temperate forested landscapes in south‐eastern Australia that encompass a broad continuum from climate‐limited to fuel‐limited. Climate‐mediated change in weather and fuel was predicted to intensify fire regimes in all six landscapes by increasing wildfire extent and intensity and decreasing fire interval, potentially led by an earlier start to the fire season. Future weather was the dominant factor influencing changes in all the tested fire regime attributes: area burnt, area burnt at high intensity, fire interval, high‐intensity fire interval, and season midpoint. However, effects of future fuel acted synergistically or antagonistically with future weather depending on the landscape and the fire regime attribute. Our results suggest that fire regimes are likely to shift across temperate ecosystems in south‐eastern Australia in coming decades, particularly in climate‐limited systems where there is the potential for a greater availability of fuels to burn through increased aridity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuel load and structure are fundamental drivers of fire behaviour. Accurate data is required for managers and researchers to better understand our ability to alter fire risk. While there are many ways to quantify fuel, visual assessment methods are generally considered the most efficient. Visual hazard assessments are commonly used by managers, government agencies and consultants to provide a fuel hazard score or rating but not a quantity of fuel. Many systems attempt to convert the hazard score or rating to a fuel load for use in fire behaviour models. Here we investigate whether the conversion table in the widely used Overall Fuel Hazard Guide (OFHG) matches destructively sampled fuel loads from 116 sites across five forest types. We specifically examine whether there are quantifiable differences that can be attributed to forest type. We found there is overlap between the two methods for low, moderate and high hazard categories, however for the very high and extreme hazard categories, visual assessment overestimated fuel load in four of the five forest types. Using a commonly applied fire behaviour model, we found that the overestimation of fuel load in very high and extreme hazard categories leads to an overestimation of fire behavior in these hazard categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]