Fire as a fundamental ecological process: Research advances and frontiers

Fire is a powerful ecological and evolutionary force that regulates organismal traits, population sizes, species interactions, community composition, carbon and nutrient cycling and ecosystem function. It also presents a rapidly growing societal challenge, due to both increasingly destructive wildfires and fire exclusion in fire‐dependent ecosystems. As an ecological process, fire integrates complex feedbacks among biological, social and geophysical processes, requiring coordination across several fields and scales of study. Here, we describe the diversity of ways in which fire operates as a fundamental ecological and evolutionary process on Earth. We explore research priorities in six categories of fire ecology: (a) characteristics of fire regimes, (b) changing fire regimes, (c) fire effects on above‐ground ecology, (d) fire effects on below‐ground ecology, (e) fire behaviour and (f) fire ecology modelling. We identify three emergent themes: the need to study fire across temporal scales, to assess the mechanisms underlying a variety of ecological feedbacks involving fire and to improve representation of fire in a range of modelling contexts. Synthesis: As fire regimes and our relationships with fire continue to change, prioritizing these research areas will facilitate understanding of the ecological causes and consequences of future fires and rethinking fire management alternatives

Organizational Learning from Prescribed Fire Escapes: a Review of Developments Over the Last 10 Years in the USA and Australia

Purpose of Review: Prescribed fire escapes continue to challenge most fire and land management agencies and many communities. This article considers the issue from knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning (OL) perspectives. We review organizational initiatives and the literature that have developed over the last 10 years to support learning from escaped prescribed fires, then use this to evaluate current learning practices and identify potential next frontiers for improving performance. Due to the difficulty obtaining statistics for non-federal entities, this review focuses primarily on developments in the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, but also captures reviews from the US Department of Interior, and the State of Victoria, Australia. Recent Findings: The recurring issue of prescribed fire escapes may in part be explained by the increasing challenges and expectations fire and land management agencies and prescribed fire managers face. Agencies are being asked to burn more area and suitably contain prescribed fires with fewer resources. In many jurisdictions, this challenge is heightened by increasingly tough climate conditions, shifting demographics internal and external to their agencies, changing patterns of land use, and requirements to meet increasing fuel reduction targets. A range of interventions has been developed and implemented by state and federal land and fire management agencies to support improved performance through KM and OL. However, prescribed fires continue to escape, often for the same reasons they always have, leading us to ask: is there a next frontier or level for improving performance though learning? Summary: This paper reviews recent developments in KM and OL to develop a model of organizational learning for prescribed fire. We then use this lens to review learning from prescribed burn escapes in Australia and the USA, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that agencies continue to face. Four areas of concentration to further strengthen OL are proposed, namely (i) strengthening the organizational learning culture, (ii) greater use of communities of practice to enhance lesson sharing, (iii) addressing the slow build time for prescribed burning expertise to replace pending retirements, and (iv) improving non-technical skills and human factors training