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Background: Handcrews dig handlines to bare mineral soil for fire containment. Increasing the amount of firefighting resources is insufficient to mitigate wildfire damage or decrease the number of large fires. Aims: This study aims to empirically assess handcrew fireline production rates through direct monitoring of suppression actions on active wildfires. Methods: A database was created from information gathered by crew supervisors during wildfires in southern Spain between 2014 and 2019. Fireline production rates were calculated from working time and handline length. Key results: Mean fireline production rate during direct attack in chaparral was 0.33 m min−1 firefighter−1, whereas production in timber litter was 1.06 m min−1 firefighter−1. However, fireline production rate was considerably reduced during indirect attack, in fuel types with high fuel loading, on wildfires larger than 50 ha, after 3 h of sustained suppression action, with crews of more than nine firefighters, in unsuccessful fire containment, and when the ground crews lacked aerial support. Conclusions: Our results suggest mean fireline production rates need to be modified by working conditions and psychological variables to better inform efficient acquisition and allocation of resources. Implications: Knowing the operating capability of firefighting resources is important to fire managers for reducing uncertainty and guaranteeing the safety and effectiveness of suppression. This study aims to assess handcrew fireline production rates empirically on wildfires in southern Spain. Handcrew fireline production rate increases with direct attack, fuel types with low loads, aerial support and fire containment success. However, it decreases with longer working times and larger fire and crew sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving decision processes and the informational basis upon which decisions are made in pursuit of safer and more effective fire response have become key priorities of the fire research community. One area of emphasis is bridging the gap between fire researchers and managers through development of application-focused, operationally relevant decision support tools. In this paper we focus on a family of such tools designed to characterise the difficulty of suppression operations by weighing suppression challenges against suppression opportunities. These tools integrate potential fire behaviour, vegetation cover types, topography, road and trail networks, existing fuel breaks and fireline production potential to map the operational effort necessary for fire suppression. We include case studies from two large fires in the USA and Spain to demonstrate model updates and improvements intended to better capture extreme fire behaviour and present results demonstrating successful fire containment where suppression difficulty index (SDI) values were low and containment only after a moderation of fire weather where SDI values were high. A basic aim of this work is reducing the uncertainty and increasing the efficiency of suppression operations through assessment of landscape conditions and incorporation of expert knowledge into planning. This research summarises current applications and improvements to methods used to characterise wildfire suppression difficulty in forested landscapes. We demonstrate application of a suppression difficulty index variant developed for real-time decision support on fires in the USA and a series of recent improvements applied to a wildfire in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Characterising the impacts of wildland fire and fire suppression is critical information for fire management decision-making. Here, we focus on decisions related to the rare larger and longer-duration fire events, where the scope and scale of decision-making can be far broader than initial response efforts, and where determining and demonstrating efficiency of strategies and actions can be particularly troublesome. We organise our review around key decision factors such as context, complexity, alternatives, consequences and uncertainty, and for illustration contrast fire management in Andalusia, Spain, and Montana, USA. Two of the largest knowledge gaps relate to quantifying fire impacts to ecosystem services, and modelling relationships between fire management activities and avoided damages. The relative magnitude of these and other concerns varies with the complexity of the socioecological context in which fire management decisions are made. To conclude our review, we examine topics for future research, including expanded use of the economics toolkit to better characterise the productivity and effectiveness of suppression actions, integration of ecosystem modelling with economic principles, and stronger adoption of risk and decision analysis within fire management decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildfire is a global phenomenon that plays a vital role in regulating and maintaining many natural and human-influenced ecosystems but that also poses considerable risks to human populations and infrastructure. Fire managers are charged with balancing the short-term protection of human assets sensitive to fire exposure against the potential long-term benefits that wildfires can provide to natural systems and wildlife populations. The compressed decision timeframes imposed on fire managers during an incident are often insufficient to fully assess a range of fire management options and their respective implications for public and fire responder safety, attainment of land and resource objectives, and future trajectories of hazard and risk. This paper reviews the role of GIS-based assessment and planning to support operational wildfire management decisions, with a focus on recent and emerging research that pre-identifies anthropogenic and biophysical landscape features that can be leveraged to increase the safety and effectiveness of wildfire management operations. We use a case study from the United States to illustrate the development and application of tools that draw from research generated by the global fire management community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, in Spain and most European countries, forest fire budgets have never been subjected to an objective and rigorous economic analysis indicative of the returns on investments in fire management protection programs. Thus far we have witnessed expansive growth of costs without any investment planning. New economic realities and more focussed oversight by regulating organisations are forcing agencies with fire protection responsibilities to formally justify their fire protection budget requests. The fire economies evaluation system described here (SINAMI) is the first attempt by Spain's National Forest System to help agencies with fire responsibilities perfonn an economic analysis of their budget requests for fire management and protection. SINAMI uses a marginal analysis and the economic criterion of cost-plus-net-value change (C+NVC) to determine the most efficient program and budget level for fire protection for a simulated fire season. The results are used in establishing strategic fire management plans to respond to historical fire situations. The model also provides information on number of fires and area affected by fire intensity level, as well as the number and type of firefighting resources used through the simulated fire season. The SINAMI model is based on the original structure of the National Fire Management Analysis System developed by the USDA Forest Service, expanded and adapted to Spanish conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]