The study of wildland fire behavior addresses the dynamics of fire spread in wildland fuels across a range of spatial scales. Fire behavior is the foundation for models used by managers in fire prediction, planning, and training. Research products that expand our knowledge of critical processes in fire behavior and yield practical advances in modeling are profoundly improving the Forest Service’s ability to manage fire and its effects.

Forest Service fire behavior research is principally organized around two key areas of study: (1) the physical processes involved in wildfire spread and behavior, and (2) developing new fire behavior and fire danger models. The Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, often referred to simply as “the Fire Lab,” is widely recognized as a global leader in fire science. Work at the Fire Lab spans decades and has included diverse and complex investigations involving hundreds of scientists, engineers and skilled technicians. The Forest Service Fire Modelling Institute is a center of expertise that informs fire management, planning, and science implementation through fire and fuels modeling.

The Forest Service invests in this critical area of fire research because:

• Over the last few decades, the wildland fire management environment has profoundly changed. Longer fire seasons, larger and more intense fires, extreme fire behavior, and wildfire suppression operations in the wildland urban interface (WUI) have become the norm.
• Understanding fire behavior and ecological effects helps us better coexist with fire as a natural process and protect the communities within fire-prone landscapes.
• Understanding the physics of how wildfires spread and behave through experiment-based research is critical for building reliable and credible models for fire operations and planning, decreasing wildfire losses and reducing accidents and fatalities.
• More than 73,000 wildfires burn an average of about 7 million acres of private, state and federal land in the U.S. each year. Forest Service firefighters respond to a significant number of these forest and grassland fires, and fire behavior research directly enhances firefighter safety and effectiveness by informing training, tools and equipment to respond to forest and grassland fires.

Featured Work

The National Fire Danger Rating System allows fire managers to estimate today's and tomorrow’s fire danger within a given area. Fire Danger is widely recognized as Smokey Bear’s standing next to a sign that indicates low, moderate, high, very high and extreme fire danger.

The Fire Behavior Assessment Team measures pre-fire fuels and vegetation, active-fire behavior, and post-fire effects. Measurements are used to study post-fire recovery and have inform Burned Area Emergency Response activities.

The BehavePlus program calculates fire behavior for any fire management application. It uses specified fuel and moisture conditions to simulate surface and crown fire rates of spread and intensity, probability of ignition, fire size, spotting distance, and tree mortality.

The FlamMap fire mapping and analysis system simulates potential fire behavior characteristics (spread rate, flame length, fireline intensity, etc.), fire growth and spread, and conditional burn probabilities under constant environmental conditions (weather and fuel moisture).