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Changes in climate, land use, and land management impact the occurrence and severity of wildland fires in many parts of the world. This is particularly evident in Europe, where ongoing changes in land use have strongly modified fire patterns over the last decades. Although satellite data by the European Forest Fire Information System provide large-scale wildland fire statistics across European countries, there is still a crucial need to collect and summarize in-depth local analysis and understanding of the wildland fire condition and associated challenges across Europe. This article aims to provide a general overview of the current wildland fire patterns and challenges as perceived by national representatives, supplemented by national fire statistics (2009–2018) across Europe. For each of the 31 countries included, we present a perspective authored by scientists or practitioners from each respective country, representing a wide range of disciplines and cultural backgrounds. The authors were selected from members of the COST Action “Fire and the Earth System: Science & Society” funded by the European Commission with the aim to share knowledge and improve communication about wildland fire. Where relevant, a brief overview of key studies, particular wildland fire challenges a country is facing, and an overview of notable recent fire events are also presented. Key perceived challenges included (1) the lack of consistent and detailed records for wildland fire events, within and across countries, (2) an increase in wildland fires that pose a risk to properties and human life due to high population densities and sprawl into forested regions, and (3) the view that, irrespective of changes in management, climate change is likely to increase the frequency and impact of wildland fires in the coming decades. Addressing challenge (1) will not only be valuable in advancing national and pan-European wildland fire management strategies, but also in evaluating perceptions (2) and (3) against more robust quantitative evidence.

The determination of the amount of residual carbon in biomass ash is important not only for the assessment of the efficiency of biomass fuel combustion but also as one of the criteria for the estimation of biomass ash potential use. In this paper carbon content in biomass ash was analysed by applying two methods: total organic carbon analysis (TOC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) in an inert (N2) and oxidizing (O2) atmosphere. The amount of inorganic (carbonate) carbon can be directly calculated from the TGA curve and the obtained results are in a good agreement with the ones obtained using TOC analyser. On the other hand, the quantitative determination of organic and elemental carbon by TGA is not straight-forward since the temperature range of their oxidation overlaps with dehydration temperature of portlandite that is a constituent of biomass ash. It can be concluded that a basic version of the thermogravimetric analyzer can be used for the determination of inorganic carbon in ash samples, but for total organic carbon determination, it is recommended to use hyphenated techniques, for example, TGA-MS or TGA-FTIR that allows quantitation of evolved gases (CO2 and H2O).

The objectives of the study are twofold. First, we aim to examine the most influential socio-economic indicators to explain energy consumption in Republic of Serbia. The second objective is to develop models that are able to predict the future energy consumption in the Republic of Serbia. This could be the first important step towards proper energy management in the country. Several potential socio-economic indicators are selected to be the independent variables. Regression analysis is conducted to select the most relevant independent variables as well as building the multiple linear regression (MLR) models. In addition, an artificial neural networks (ANN) model is developed as a comparison. Finally, the energy demand is projected to the year 2022. It is found that both models show the declining trend with respect to the current level of energy consumption.

Although the use of waste materials as mineral admixtures for self-compacting concrete can contribute to solving the problem of their disposal, the effect of such use should be further explored. The influence of fly ash, powdered waste brick elements - roof tiles, flotation tailing and silica fume, on the consistency, compressive strength, bending tensile strength, and tensile splitting strength of concrete, is studied. Self-compacting concrete mixtures test results are compared to a common concrete mixture.